Re: comparison of desktop indexers

[Michal Pryc <Michal Pryc Sun COM>]

Joe Shaw wrote:
> 
> Sadly, they are using Beagle 0.2.7 in their tests, a 7 month old
> version. :(  In releases since then, we added support for wildcard
> searches, indexing of archives and their contents, and of course tons of
> memory use fixes.  The doc was originally written in November and
> updated in December; it would be nice to see updated Beagle stats.

It's the newest copy that was in the fresh gentoo ebuilds (December 2006).
The strigi and tracker were also not the newest ones. Beagle is the most
*mature* project from compared ones and I would say that it is not a
point to get all the *new* features to be shown. Rather I would look at
this comparison from small distance and thell what might be improved in
current release than telling what was done since compared version.

> 
> Beagle fares pretty well overall.  Indexing speed is good, the index is
> relatively small, and it's still the most featureful of the indexers out
> there.
:-)

> I do have a little beef with some of their statistics: referencing
> numbers from "top" for memory usage -- VmSize is an effectively useless
> statistic because it includes all mappings, whether they're read-only or
> not.  (This is why X is so big in top: it maps in all of video memory.)
> Dirty, private maps from pmap would have been a more useful statistic.
> Also, Beagle doesn't do so well in "daemon startup", but how they
> measure this is entirely undefined.

Right, that is why on the page 8: "The top command is not very good for
those types of comparison, cause it takes data from the /proc.
Exmap is a tool that allows accurately determine how much physical
memory is used by individual process and shared libraries."

> 
> By and large the writers did their homework -- with Beagle, anyway.  The
> only real inaccuracy I found with regards to Beagle was in saying that
> the number of results in Beagle was capped at 100 without a way to
> override this.  While it can't be overridden in beagle-search, it can
> with beagle-query or the various programmatic APIs.  

Beagle-query can not override 100 limit, not in the tested version (I
have tried this)

Newer versions of
> beagle-search show the total number of matched documents, but in general
> this isn't a weakness; Google won't show you beyond the 1000th hit,
> either, but you'd never know that because you never paged that far.


> 
> Anyway, it's a great resource to have, and I appreciate the work by
> Michal Pryc and Xusheng Hou.
> 

Thanks,
Once again this document was written to give some input to the future
development to get better ones :-)

-- 
cheers
Michal Pryc