Re: Beagle on encrypted partitions yeilds horrible system performance

["Joe Shaw" <joe joeshaw org>]

Hi,

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 11:12 AM, Debajyoti Bera <dbera web gmail com> wrote:
> > I am hitting kind of a nasty performance problem, my current test setup is
>  > a two disk mdraid RAID0 setup with lvm ontop of a dmcrypt, all partitions
>  > beagle touches are ext4. Now every time beagle 0.3.4 indexes a folder, the
>  > entire system becomes near non responsive, typing yeilds detection of
>  > multiple key presses and kcryptd and beagle-helper are combined using 100%
>  > CPU (in about a 80/20 split with beagle being the 20%).
>
>  Hmm... and the "encrypted partition" is not a red-herring ? I mean, could it
>  be ext4 ? Could it be extended attribute in ext4 ? Could it be just some
>  undetected bug in beagle ? Ahh ... ok - "kcryptd and beagle-helper are
>  combined using 100% CPU (in about a 80/20 split with beagle being the 20%)" -
>  so there is something to do with kcryptd.

Beagle does do a tremendous amount of IO, so I don't think it's
unreasonable that reading a large chunk of data off the disk and
writing large chunks to the index is CPU-bound when we're talking
about an encrypted home directory.

I would be interested in knowing if other similarly IO-heavy
operations (like "find /") are also CPU bound.  Does setting
BEAGLE_STORAGE_DIR to something on a different (non-encrypted) home
directory change things?

There may be no real solution to this, short of having Beagle's
scheduler throttle itself more extremely, which will slow down
indexing.  Load average is already taken into account, but maybe it
should be given more weight.

Joe