[tomboy-list] Scalability of Tomboy

[Gabriel Filion]

On 11/10/2010 12:31 PM, Robin Brandt wrote:
> I started getting a very lousy performance once my library became big,
> especially with one very big note. I see this as a huge shortcoming!
> *Robin Brandt*
> 
> 
> 
> On Sat, Jul 3, 2010 at 12:44, Josep M Fontana <josepm.fontana at upf.edu>wrote:
> 
>> [...] I think the simplicity, synchronization capabilities
>> and multi-platform of Tomboy could compensate for some of its possible
>> shortcomings. For instance, for me the lack of a more sophisticated tagging
>> system that would allow multiple tags for a single note is a limitation in
>> Tomboy. Another thing I find a bit limiting is the impossibility of
>> embedding notebooks into other notebooks so that a more complex
>> categorization structure of notes could be visualized. I guess the two
>> limitations are related since they amount to t
>>  he same basic limitation: difficulty in restricting the search for
>> information.

Yes, I do also think it is a shortcoming. However, FYI Tomboy actually
has a tagging mechanism and notebooks are implemented as a special tag
attached to notes.
In my understanding, Tomboy restricts the use of notebooks to one per
note max for simplicity of use for users. This is nice and I do
understand it, but I'd really like to be able to add normal tags to
notes as well as having notebooks to have more tools for categorisation.

If you're not too afraid of the command line, there's a CLI interface to
Tomboy [1] that exposes all tags. I plan on adding the possibility to
modify notes on the command line, and to add to this the feature of
managing normal tags (the search command that is currently there already
lets you search for custom tags).

[1]: https://github.com/lelutin/scout

>> What is worrying me a little bit, though, is the scalability of such a text
>> database system. Right now everything is very fast since the amount of notes
>> I have as well their size is still considerably small. But as the number of
>> notes, their size and the amount of notebooks increases will everything
>> grind to a halt? One of the things I was considering is to have different
>> Tomboys for different projects so that if one of them became corrupted or
>> degraded this wouldn't affect my whole text-management life. I realized very
>> soon that this is technically rather difficult if not impossible. So thanks
>> to the organization into notebooks I can keep things a bit tidy separating
>> different projects or themes into different notebooks, but as the number and
>> size of projects increases will Tomboy cease to be useful and workable?

It really depends on how much data you actually want to hold in Tomboy.
The more you'll have notes, the more files that Tomboy needs to open and
search through when you perform a search.
One thing you could do when the number of notes gets too high, would be
to export old notes in order to archive them (and remove them from Tomboy).
But if there's really an incredible amount of data, I guess a full
fledged wiki with a database would be interesting.. (maybe a tomboy
plugin to edit notes from a wiki as raw text and then syncing them back
to the web-based wiki later would be an interesting thing to develop?)

FWIW, an ex-colleague of mine had around 200-something notes, and he
told me that it was beginning to get a little bit slow but that the
biggest drawback was still with searching for notes.

-- 
Gabriel Filion