Don’t know if this has been considered or planned already, but having a way to monitor the activity level of the maidsafe software on your computer would be a nice feature.
What I would imagine is that each category of resource such as CPU, memory, diskspace and maybe network traffic, would have a stat showing the current usage and the max allowed usage. Something like this:
CPU: 12% of 30%
Network: 2% of 100%
Memory: 1.5GB of 4GB (8GB total)
Disk: 43GB of 100GB (400GB total)
For convenience, this could also be the way which you adjust your limits for these resources. It would be nice if these could be adjusted while the connection is active, but if not this could allow you to set a limit and then re-boot the connection with the new settings.
Reasons:
One of the main reasons I thought this is useful is to figure out why one’s computer or network connection running slow, and also for other computer management tasks. If someone needs to run a resource intensive application, scaling down the maidsafe usage would be nice.
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Great, would indeed be handy to set a limit like: shut down computer after 4 GB of data routed. That way people can go to work, leave their computer up and running but without any worry that a data limit is crossed.
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I like this for UX convenience, but really its a data cap issue, and needs to be handled outside of SAFE. Partly because its not SAFE’s responsibility - its your whole system - and secondly because other things left running will also be using bandwidth, and SAFE should not attempt to account for those.
A general bandwidth use / limiting application would be more appropriate, and is platform dependent. I would think they exist already. I have a monitor on my android phone, and its actually really annoying because I have unlimited bandwidth, and it insists on warning me every month. I keep it because I want to keep an idea of my usage, but I don’t need warnings or limits.
Perhaps the network stat is throwing off my main point. Discarding that component, I think maidsafe vaults do need a way to limit the disk space used. I don’t think it will be generally acceptable to have to dedicate a whole drive or partition to maidsafe because it can’t limit how much space it uses. It will have to know its limit even if it’s going to use a whole drive. It will need to know can I store X amount of data? The data managers might need to know it or at least be able to ask the node, can you fit 3gb more data? That sort of thing.
After further thought, Memory, Network and CPU usage maybe are too difficult to cordon off. Maybe it’s either running or not, and it will just use a part of these as necessary. I thought that part of the idea of maidsafe is that this can scale for different devices well. Maybe a mobile device can’t perform as many functions as a computer, or something like that. Is functionality scaling being considered or is the goal just lightweight code that just doesn’t do too much, and so can be run on almost anything?
Vault size is a configuration setting. I expect it will suggest a value based on the system type, disk size, free space, but this will be adjustable. I’m not sure if it will be adjustable after installation, but i don’t see why not.
Keep in mind vaults may not, and in many cases may likely not be, running on dedicated computers but rather are just another app among many. Therefore a maidsafe vault needs to learn to live with a user’s day to day tasks be that office work or heavy duty gaming. Granted one could create a stand alone dedicated farming rig but that’s not the only kind of computer that will be using SAFE.
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