Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

dhave · 2010-02-12 18:21:00

Can anybody give me a few good reasons why I should use Nepomuk? I'm reluctant to enable something that will no doubt add to the load on my system, but if it's got offsetting benefits, I'd be willing to consider it.

Thanks.

Rasi · 2010-02-12 18:53:26

dhave wrote:

Can anybody give me a few good reasons why I should use Nepomuk? I'm reluctant to enable something that will no doubt add to the load on my system, but if it's got offsetting benefits, I'd be willing to consider it.
Thanks.

i doubt that nepomuk will add notable load. its the strigi part that can be quite cpu intensive. And you dont have to use strigi if you only want tagging of files.

Last edited by Rasi (2010-02-12 18:58:53)

Gen2ly · 2010-02-12 22:33:47

Nepomuk (or was it strigi) was supposed to move to new default backend I believe for KDE 4.4. The backend was supposed to be a whole lot better than the previous default one, but I don't know as I haven't upgraded yet. Before I had both Neo and Strigi disabled but as Rasi said mostly the performance hits come from Strigi.

Snakeye · 2010-02-13 01:33:44

Nepomuk/strigi in kde 4.3 used to crash Dolphin on me regularly so i disabled it. It no longer crashes Dolphin on me in kde 4.4 which is a great improvement, but unfortunatley it is very resource hungry and you will not want to have it running in the background concurrently. My hardware is relatively modern being only a year since purchase and i notice huge permance hits while it is running, so my tendancy is to keep it disabled. If you do not run other programs that are resource hungry as well you might not notice. Personally i think that a search/indexing service should be invisible/unoticeable to the user, so i hope development improves to the point in the future where it isn't necessary to disable those services.

My tip would then be to enable it only when you need it. It does work well by itself.

Rasi · 2010-02-13 03:43:50

Are you sure it is not indexing? Once it has finished doing so cpu usage should go down to 1%

IncredibleLaser · 2010-02-13 10:30:13

After indexing, according to top, strigi causes less than 1% cpu load (cpu clocked at 800MHz).

davidm · 2010-02-13 16:54:22

Snakeye wrote:

Nepomuk/strigi in kde 4.3 used to crash Dolphin on me regularly so i disabled it. It no longer crashes Dolphin on me in kde 4.4 which is a great improvement, but unfortunatley it is very resource hungry and you will not want to have it running in the background concurrently. My hardware is relatively modern being only a year since purchase and i notice huge permance hits while it is running, so my tendancy is to keep it disabled. If you do not run other programs that are resource hungry as well you might not notice. Personally i think that a search/indexing service should be invisible/unoticeable to the user, so i hope development improves to the point in the future where it isn't necessary to disable those services.
My tip would then be to enable it only when you need it. It does work well by itself.

I agree. I don't see why they don't have a cap on CPU usage to say 20% when the screensaver is not active. If I enable it on mine it varies between 50% - 95% CPU usage. This is the indexer that is responsible. If there were a feature which enabled indexing only when the screensaver was active I would re-enable it.

davidm · 2010-02-13 16:56:38

IncredibleLaser wrote:

After indexing, according to top, strigi causes less than 1% cpu load (cpu clocked at 800MHz).

The problem however is that at least on my machine I have let it index overnight without it finishing so I have to keep suspending it otherwise my computer is unusable. I wish the indexer were more intelligent.

dhave · 2010-02-15 03:23:51

But just how useful is this kind of indexing? Does it lead to a huge performance boost? If so, in what sorts of applications?

I'm ignorant about all this.

panosk · 2010-02-15 09:56:34

The Nepomuk and Strigi ideas are fantastic. After upgrading to 4.4, I let strigi do its things. For a couple of days, indexing was indeed quite resource hungry, but it was smart enough to disable itself on my laptop when there was no ac adapter, or on my desktop when I was doing some serious multitasking. After the initial indexing, strigi is idle unless there is a major overload with new files/directories. I am confident that in the near future I will be able to organize perfectly my directories and files. I don't know about you, but every couple of months I need to spend a couple of days to get rid of junk and organize somehow my files and directories. Strigi and nepomuk will make it possible to organize my files in a perfect way with minimum fuss. For example, if I wanted to find a pdf manual I had downloaded a year ago, I could just search for pdf files with the tag "manual" and time stamp a year ago. This will restrict the hundreds/thousands pdfs to just a few.

And the above is just a case. Emailing sb right from the desktop is another fantastic possibility. Just type the first letters of the person you want to send an e-mail and the contact appears automagically as a search result. You no longer have to open your contacts program, search for the person, and then send the e-mail. IMHO, these are all extremely time-saving features.

For the time being, the whole idea still doesn't work as expected. The functionality is all there now, but there are bugs. I suppose (hope) this means we won't have to wait until KDE 4.5, but things will get fixed in the next maintenance releases.

Bralkein · 2010-02-15 10:58:16

I second what others have said about the performance, the indexing thrashed my machine to begin with but after its first full run I don't notice it at all. It is very useful for tagging things and just for general searching, too. For example, I no longer need a note-taking app, I just make text files and tag them appropriately. You can search everything just by typing words in the Alt-F2 dialogue. Very impressive and useful, IMHO.

If you're worried about system load due to indexing then you can always restrict what is indexed. There is a very simple interface for selecting what should be indexed.

naphtali · 2010-02-16 14:29:34

I gather this new technology will be network aware. I personally do not trust any technology that can hook up to the web/network easily. If it index and knows all my files, then would not it be possible for any hacker to access the content of your whole hard drive quite easily. Or am I just paranoid. Make no mistake people, these are the times in which we live. Agree or disagree...

jxy · 2010-02-16 15:56:34

naphtali wrote:

I gather this new technology will be network aware. I personally do not trust any technology that can hook up to the web/network easily. If it index and knows all my files, then would not it be possible for any hacker to access the content of your whole hard drive quite easily. Or am I just paranoid. Make no mistake people, these are the times in which we live. Agree or disagree...

Indexed or not, those information is always on your hard drive. Indexing does not make your files easier to be stolen.

Primoz · 2010-02-16 18:17:31

I use nepomuk, and strigi in hope that if I use alt+F2 to find some file it will find it given it's contents and not just it's name.
Unfortunately most of the times it doesn't find what I'm looking for. But I'm OK with that, iI guess it will get better.
I mean it's twice as good as it was even in KDE4.3, then it didn't find anything or just bookmarks.
Now it finds a lot of things, just not what I'm wanting to find...

jxy · 2010-02-16 18:37:13

I found it particularly useful to tag a file and ask runner to search the tag.

dhave · 2010-02-16 20:08:20

jxy wrote:

I found it particularly useful to tag a file and ask runner to search the tag.

I think I need to read up on how to use these newer tagging and searching features. I've always done most of my searching from the command line.

takedown · 2010-02-16 20:55:59

dhave wrote:

I think I need to read up on how to use these newer tagging and searching features. I've always done most of my searching from the command line.

+1

habbe · 2010-02-16 22:23:38

I've wondered whether this idea could be incorporated in filesystem itself. To only have a "name" and "path" to a file, isn't it a primitive way to structure information?

Anyway, the semantic desktop is the future. A file on a computer is nothing; it is the user who gives a meaning to that information, and this process is important. We can have a layer of "metainformation" on top of the files, which contains the information the user gives to the files, and which can develop as the user develops his understanding. In a way it is a digital representation (and extension) of one's mind.

naphtali · 2010-02-17 01:25:13

jxy wrote:

naphtali wrote:
I gather this new technology will be network aware. I personally do not trust any technology that can hook up to the web/network easily. If it index and knows all my files, then would not it be possible for any hacker to access the content of your whole hard drive quite easily. Or am I just paranoid. Make no mistake people, these are the times in which we live. Agree or disagree...
Indexed or not, those information is always on your hard drive. Indexing does not make your files easier to be stolen.

No it does not make it easier to be stolen, but it sure makes it easier to find by anyone. I do not have a problem with indexing software such as Nepomuk/Stringi, just the fact that the indexed file(s) is not just locally accessible, but remotely as well. It seems like everything is being setup to connect easily, effectively, and efficiently on a global basis. I am just saying it's scary because what I create on my computer should be for me personally, unless I wish to share it explicitly. Question? Does Nepomuk/Stringi have security features built-in when it come to remote accessing the index file database(s) on ones' computer. I am talking apart from system wide security here.

Last edited by naphtali (2010-02-17 01:36:51)

jxy · 2010-02-17 03:21:25

naphtali wrote:

jxy wrote:
naphtali wrote:
I gather this new technology will be network aware. I personally do not trust any technology that can hook up to the web/network easily. If it index and knows all my files, then would not it be possible for any hacker to access the content of your whole hard drive quite easily. Or am I just paranoid. Make no mistake people, these are the times in which we live. Agree or disagree...
Indexed or not, those information is always on your hard drive. Indexing does not make your files easier to be stolen.
No it does not make it easier to be stolen, but it sure makes it easier to find by anyone. I do not have a problem with indexing software such as Nepomuk/Stringi, just the fact that the indexed file(s) is not just locally accessible, but remotely as well. It seems like everything is being setup to connect easily, effectively, and efficiently on a global basis. I am just saying it's scary because what I create on my computer should be for me personally, unless I wish to share it explicitly. Question? Does Nepomuk/Stringi have security features built-in when it come to remote accessing the index file database(s) on ones' computer. I am talking apart from system wide security here.

AFAIK, everything is using posix standard socket to communicate with each other. Nothing is connected to tcp/ip. It is more secure than starting sshd. And it is much more secure than the conventional X server that you used to connect to via tcp ports. So don't worry about the security issue for now.

smakked · 2010-02-17 09:51:55

I disabled strigi as it was chewing into my memory, just hit 6gig of ram used WTF is thta all about?

agapito · 2010-02-17 11:27:15

I disabled strigi because i indexed all my hard drive (50.000 files) and every time i start a kde session index again same files!!!

Primoz · 2010-02-17 11:49:56

agapito wrote:

I disabled strigi because i indexed all my hard drive (50.000 files) and every time i start a kde session index again same files!!!

You know that you can set strigi to index only what you think will need?
I set it to index just few folder in my home.
And it indexes files again and again, so that it adds if anything changes and I think (not sure) that every time it indexes it adds another info to index.
At least that's how I see it.

schivmeister · 2010-02-17 18:37:11

It worked for me perfectly as far back as when it was introduced. It takes a long time to index thousands of small files, but luckily I place those outside of home.

rune0077 · 2010-02-17 19:33:11

naphtali wrote:

No it does not make it easier to be stolen, but it sure makes it easier to find by anyone. I do not have a problem with indexing software such as Nepomuk/Stringi, just the fact that the indexed file(s) is not just locally accessible, but remotely as well. It seems like everything is being setup to connect easily, effectively, and efficiently on a global basis. I am just saying it's scary because what I create on my computer should be for me personally, unless I wish to share it explicitly. Question? Does Nepomuk/Stringi have security features built-in when it come to remote accessing the index file database(s) on ones' computer. I am talking apart from system wide security here.

Easily enough accomplished. You can chose yourself which files and folders nepomuk indexes and hence what will go in the database. So you can set nepomuk to monitor your "share-with-everyone" folder but tell it to stay away from your folder named "My-super-secret-stuff" and then that folder will not have anything to do with the database.

Also, I think there's no real way for anyone "outside" your system to access your nepomuk database. At the end of the day, it's just a database file located in your .kde4 folder. I fail to see how anyone should read information from that, unless you're sharing your home directory with the entire network, in which case nepomuk hardly makes any difference since everyone already has free access to your important information.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-02-12 18:21:00

Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#2 2010-02-12 18:53:26

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#3 2010-02-12 22:33:47

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#4 2010-02-13 01:33:44

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#5 2010-02-13 03:43:50

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#6 2010-02-13 10:30:13

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#7 2010-02-13 16:54:22

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#8 2010-02-13 16:56:38

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#9 2010-02-15 03:23:51

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#10 2010-02-15 09:56:34

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#11 2010-02-15 10:58:16

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#12 2010-02-16 14:29:34

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#13 2010-02-16 15:56:34

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#14 2010-02-16 18:17:31

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#15 2010-02-16 18:37:13

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#16 2010-02-16 20:08:20

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#17 2010-02-16 20:55:59

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#18 2010-02-16 22:23:38

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#19 2010-02-17 01:25:13

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#20 2010-02-17 03:21:25

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#21 2010-02-17 09:51:55

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#22 2010-02-17 11:27:15

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#23 2010-02-17 11:49:56

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#24 2010-02-17 18:37:11

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

#25 2010-02-17 19:33:11

Re: Nepomuk: to use or not to use ...

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