Enhanced Upstart User Sessions for the Raring desktop

[Robert Bruce Park]

On 12-11-21 12:41 PM, Phillip Susi wrote:
 > What sort of services are started right now but aren't necessarily
 > required?

Gwibber-service is often trotted out as an example of a long-running 
process that is highly inefficient and sucks up a lot of RAM while it is 
operating.

The new friends-service that replaces it is much more efficient, however 
it would still benefit from the concept of being event-driven, only 
being launched periodically when it is needed rather than running all of 
the time. That way it can start up, use up all the RAM is wants, then 
exit and free all the RAM.

We've taken steps to ensure that friends-service will work well in that 
kind of environment, and all we're missing is some kind of cron-like 
userspace daemon that can invoke us periodically to download new messages.

We already have the ability to, eg, launch ourselves when somebody 
clicks the 'refresh' button in the gwibber client (this is done via dbus 
activation), however we still need to be a long-running process in order 
to do our periodic refreshes as well, which is wasteful of memory.