Proposal for a MIME mapping spec

[Thomas Leonard]

On Thu, Jul 08, 2004 at 07:48:53AM -0700, Philip Peake wrote:
> Alexander Larsson wrote:
> >On Wed, 2004-07-07 at 23:46, Philip Peake wrote:
> >>I would also like to add a plea to at least consider adding an 
> >>abstraction layer so that the on-disk hierarchy could be replaced by a 
> >>(possibly remote) database of some description (LDAP/RDBMS/etc).
[...]
> It would also allow optimization of the config "database".
> 
> The Oregon primary (K-12) system uses a mixture of Linux and Windows 
> desktops, about 10,000 desktops in all. Students use whatever machine 
> they sit in front of. The user data/home directory is on a Samba server 
> (SMB mounts, to allow for Linux or Windows). The big problem is that of 
> scaling; at lesson change time all the students logout, move to another 
> classroom and login again -- and the fileservers melt down with the load 
> caused by the Linux desktops starting up.
> 
> They have tried the fastest disks they can find, and different disk 
> configurations - the best they can manage is to acheive something like 
> 10 KDE startups or 14 Gnome startups per drive - then the disks are 
> saturated with random IO (seeking...), there is no problem with network 
> bandwidth or disk throughput, its simply the randomness of the IO.

Interesting. Have you recorded which files are being accessed during
startup? I would have thought that most data would be read from /usr,
rather than from users' homes.

Most of the above spec is about desktop files installed by applications,
which won't normally be in $HOME, and I don't think looking up the user's
preferred application to handle various types is something that will be
done on login (even if you restore sessions, you will restore the same
application that was running last time, not re-load the old documents with
different applications).

More generally, a configuration API is probably useful, but I don't think
it will make any difference in this particular situation.


-- 
Thomas Leonard			http://rox.sourceforge.net
tal00r at ecs.soton.ac.uk	tal197 at users.sourceforge.net
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