Re: GNOME 2.10 module proposal: libnotify and notification-daemon

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sun, 2004-11-28 at 21:06 -0500, Colin Walters wrote:
> I disagree with the premise - that the problem is that we have "too
> many" daemons.  If you want to optimize, just have unused daemons exit
> after a period of disuse.

The problem is daemons that have be persistent; alarm daemons, things
that own X selections, and so forth. At least for stuff with GUI (i.e.
calls gtk_init()) there's a fair bit of overhead per-process. We already
have one "big daemon with lots of small unrelated stuff in it" (gnome-
settings-daemon) for this reason. We could easily have 50 little daemons
if we don't cram some stuff together, and if you take the base GTK
overhead as 200K (too low last time I was paying attention), that's 10
megs.

For security concerns my suggestion is to factor out only those daemons
that could clearly be jailed to good effect. Right now we can't
security-jail anything that connects to the X server anyhow, for
example.

We probably want anything big/complicated to be its own daemon, also.
Since we wouldn't want it to crash the main one.

Which brings us to one downside of an extensible system: it might be
nice if third-party stuff had to be out-of-process and only official
GNOME stuff was done via the dlopen thing, just so we don't get a bunch
of bug-buddy reports from other people's stuff. This is why all the
panel applets ended up out of process.

Havoc