starting Fedora Server SIG

[Martin Langhoff]

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 6:51 PM, Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think dbus as a useful sysadmin tool is still relatively unexplored.
> I think Nalin's oddjob concept could have gotten more attention and
> feedback as a dbus based admin helper.

Here at OLPC we use dbus quite a bit on the laptop side, and from a
server perspective... it sucks.

The key thing is that to have dbus listeners you have to have the
processes alive and running waiting for an interesting event. That's
just not efficient -- even if you have lots of hw, it's definitely not
smart use of your kit.

An excellent counterexample is incrond - I pass 'events' to scripts
using incrond's hooks into inotify. The scripts themselves are not
running, I only have one tiny tiny daemon listening. I can rig it to
handle thousands of specific different events and scripts, and still
the footprint is small (and if I monitor directories smartly, it
doesn't need to burden the kernel much either).

I tried to do the same thing with dbus. Right - every script had to be
running all the time. With any modern dynamic language, that's a ton
of RAM that goes to waste.

On the desktop side the same problem exists, but people unfortunately
care less - otherwise dbus wouldn't be so hot :-)

cheers,




m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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