Re: Faces audio support - comments please.

Steve Kinzler (kinzler@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu)
Wed, 3 Apr 91 17:49:47 -0500

Written Wed Apr 3 17:29:15 1991 by richb@aus.sun.com,faces@aus.sun.com in mail:
+---------- "Faces audio support - comments please." ----------
| but faces is really slow at the moment on large mail files.

Since I'm using a lowly, soundless X terminal myself nowadays, I don't
have anything to say about the audio stuff, nor have I delved into the
source code for faces to see how it really does things, but I'll ask
anyway:

Is a bottleneck to faces' speed the search for the appropriate face file?
If so, have these alternatives been considered?
- a dbm database of face locations that can be searched faster than
the directory structures; or even loaded and kept in core by the
faces program for very fast searches; something would have to update
the database every once in a while
- a face location daemon that could be asked for the appropriate face
for the given user/host
We should be ready for good performance with databases of hundreds of
hosts and thousands of users (much sooner than we probably realize) and
eventually thousands of hosts and tens of thousands of users. Unless
X-face:s become more important than the on-line databases ...

from the brain of Steve Kinzler /o)\ kinzler@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu
an organ with a mind of its own \(o/ {ames,rutgers}!iuvax!kinzler