Coming Attractions: Agent Updates

For the first time in years, I'm writing today’s weblog posts with Tinderbox’s automatic agent updates turned on. This is surprising, because this weblog document is large (6500 notes, 2000 aliases, 11,000 links ) and has nearly fifty agents. Many of those agents are searching for the entire document (about half a million words) in order to automatically assign topics or to flag posts that aren’t well linked. Others do tricky selection and formatting. (The main page, for example, is an agent.)

We’re experimenting with a new approach to agent updates. Where Tinderbox has always updated all its agents at one time, the new agent manager splits the work into many small pieces, and does each piece when time allows. It’s still not perfect; occasionally, the agent manager will bite off more than it can chew and I'll see a small delay while I'm typing. (This is on the Macbook Air, a comparatively slow machine.)

So there may still be some tuning to be done, but it’s a big improvement. And if it’s tolerable for this Tinderbox document, it’s likely to be better for yours.