DConf configuration system

[Patrick Patterson]

On Thursday 07 April 2005 09:35, Joerg Barfurth wrote:
> Doesn't sound like it has actually been use for desktop configuration.
> And how scalable is it? Are there any big applications or system that
> use the UniConf API to access their configuration?
>

I'm not going to address your previous points, because Avery can do a much 
better job than I  :).

However, we use UniConf in NITIX, and in our ExpressionDesktop desktop 
deployment projects, and have found that we can deal with 240,000 keys in a 
pretty complicated tree fairly easily (or at least, now we can :).

> FYI: OpenOffice.org 2.0 configuration has ~75 components (top-level
> keys) with ~3000 key entries in the associated schemas, queries up to 8
> backends by default (for all of these components) and has ~31000 values
> for ~22000 keys in its default data. Quite a lot of this is loaded
> sometime during startup, so the performance of this is critical for
> application startup time. Of course for a desktop system the amount of
> data in the backends will be a multiple of this and a daemon has to deal
> with concurrent requests from multiple applications.
>
As I said above, NITIX currently uses around 10x that number of keys for 
various components - and manages to distribute/replicate back and forth 
between multiple servers in a fairly efficient manner.

I'll talk to the performance tuning people, and see if I can get the 
benchmarks for loading that number of keys for you.

-- 
Patrick Patterson
Technical Ambassador
Net Integration Technologies R&D
http://open.nit.ca