Bug 121939

Created attachment 52075 [details]
fix of appspreloader.sh

type -p appspreloader.sh
/usr/bin/appspreloader.sh

maintainer preload
coolo@suse.de

removing other things from the cache isn't really the wanted effect. So I'd go 
with WONTFIX - but maybe I misunderstand 

thanks for redirecting the bug ;)

mmeiste@wilkins:/tmp> maintainer preload
bash: maintainer: command not found


My understanding of the preloading is that I want special apps preloaded not a
filesystem structure that i will normally never use, right? The cache eats all
free memory (exept a few megabytes) for caching files not needed. So if I
preload my soffice,eclipse,netbeans it would be nice if it is really preloaded.
If you test starting a lot of big apps you will see that the filesystem cache
shrinks also to get free memory.

So if you have prepared everything for preloading apps it would be nice that it
works as long if there is real free memory.

but why would you remove everything e.g. kdesktop and kicker need from the 
file system?  

Using only the really unused free memory was the original intention when I wrote
appspreloader. As Stephan already said, you don't want to remove stuff from the
cache. If you did that, you might un-preload things that you just preloaded,
causing lots of useless hard disc activity.

But this was designed to be used at login time, when there is lots of really
unused memory anyway. Markus, if I understand you correctly you want to start
the preloading directly as a user, after you have been logged in for a while,
correct? If so, what do you want to achieve with that?

Why removing kdesktop or kicker? This apps are runing, right?

I was not aware of the original intention - so I agree that it this not a bug. I
wan't to remove stuff from the cache as stuff will be removed from the cache if
I start this applications directly after login. I want to achive that the
applications which I use/start very often are preloaded - configuration files
and libraries which are only used during X/kde startup could be removed.

For a quick and dirty way to preload stuff you can do

cat /etc/preload.d/kdm | sed s/^open/W/g | sed s/^stat/S/ | preload

The question is: What will the kernel remove from cache when no unused memory is
available? If the kernel does a "least frequently used" technique, you will
remove your previously preloaded data, because it has been used only once
(during preload). If the kernel does "least recently used" it will do what you
intended and remove stuff that was only used for booting (=long time ago). You
need to ask the kernel people exactly how the kernel handles this.

see comments