[chandler-users] Chandler experiences: Memory and performance issues

[Peter Novak]

Dear Andi,
thanks a lot for your reply.

By no way do I want to start a flamewar here. But I cannot miss this
opportunity for a small irony :-).

On Fri, Jun 06, 2008 at 08:39:02AM -0700, Andi Vajda wrote:

> >>So I have a question: Is there anything I can do to make Chandler run
> >>faster on my computer except for buying a new one?
> 
> Buying more memory is cheaper than buying a new computer. I recently  
> bought 4 gb of ram for a MacBook Pro for $70.

So I will go and ask my boss to buy some new memory for my laptop. And
when he asks why I need it, I will tell him that it is because of my new
fancy organizer/calendar app :-D. Well, well... You can imagine the result ;-).

Now seriously. Me being a software engineer as well, I feel to
understand a bit of quality of software. As I already said, till now I
like Chandler approach to PIM very much, so I am willing to forgive it
small hickups and discomforts here and there. But the situation I
described above clearly shows the absurdity here. A PIM application
requires better HW than a set of software development tools! And the
advice I get is to buy more memory... :-( How come that a simple
database tool for storing 2000 entries is slower and less responsive
than a 3D rendering tool, or a C++ compiler in a full run?

Well, my feeling is, that this will one day become (if it did not yet -
I don't know, I am too new here) a roadblock for Chandler's adoption.
And it would be a pity as there seems to be a lot of potential in its
very simple idea. I am still puzzled by it and I like it very much -
well, I have a lot of time for it while Chandler does anything :-). I
even noticed that when I move mouse over the main window menu, my CPU
spikes to 100%... :-| 

Best regards,

Peter.

P.S.
I guess a lot of those performance issues are caused by how Python works
and perhaps by the way how its garbage collector works. I am not a
Python expert, but wouldn't it be possible to manually invoke the
garbage collector more often? I cannot imagine that Chandler code
genuinely allocates 200+ MB to handle such a small database... BTW, I
also noticed, that when I iconify the main window, the memory consumed
by Python drops to about 40-50 MB...

-- 
peter.novak [at] tu-clausthal.de | http://cig.in.tu-clausthal.de/
Department of Informatics | Clausthal University of Technology
Julius-Albert-Str. 4 | D-38678 Clausthal-Zellerfeld | Germany
Tel +49 5323 72 71 90 | Fax +49 5323 72 71 39 

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