[tomboy-list] Scalability of Tomboy

[Sandy Armstrong]

Hi Robin, Josep,

Tomboy does have some performance issues with very large notes, that
seem to be caused by memory leaks, and are not well understood at this
time.  However, "very large" is a relative term, and the problems only
occur when the large notes are open for a long time and lots of
editing occurs, afaik.  It's not a problem most people run into so we
don't have good data on it.

I have over 500 notes and search performance and other app performance
is the same as with 2 notes.  I have heard of some issues with 10,000
notes, though.  These are bugs that can be fixed if they are reported.

Robin, if you could be more specific about the lousy performance
you're experiencing, it might help us figure out what's going on so we
can fix it.  How many notes do you have?

Josep, there is nothing stopping you or anyone from implementing a new
tagging UI in Tomboy, since tags already exist on an API level.  I
just don't think we need that in the default UI.  As for hierarchical
notebooks, that is a feature I would like to work on but have not had
time for yet, and patches are welcome.

Sandy

On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 9:31 AM, Robin Brandt <mandelum at gmail.com> 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'm contemplating the possibility of using Tomboy as some sort of textual
>> database for projects that would involve text files that could grow to have
>> a considerable size as well as big quantities of docs (i.e. notes) and
>> categories of docs (i.e. notebooks). I feel very comfortable with Tomboy and
>> the search capabilities of Tomboy while not perfect would be good enough to
>> be practical. That is to say, probably there are more appropriate and
>> specialized tools but 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. In spite of these (probably unfair :-) ) criticisms Tomboy is
>> still the best little tool that I've found for most of my needs and it is
>> pretty amazing to realize how much I've come to depend on it and how many
>> needs it fulfills.
>>
>> 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?
>>
>> My questions have both a technical and practical aspect. What can I expect
>> in terms of performance if I add large quantities of notes to Tomboy? Are
>> there any of the participants in this forum using Tomboy with massive
>> quantities of notes and in contexts similar to the ones I was describing
>> (lots of different projects or topics)? Do you find Tomboy does the job well
>> or would you recommend another tool for larger projects?
>>
>> JM
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