[Thunar-dev] Thumbnails

[Benedikt Meurer]

Ori Bernstein wrote:
> One important thing though, is that the list gets displayed quickly, and
> doesn't freeze the filemanager while listing (Nautilus (2.10) *does* freeze when
> listing large dirs).

Thunar 1.0 will most probably also freeze, since loading stuff happens 
in the main thread, while the thumbnailer runs in a separate thread. 
This isn't much of a problem tho, since the listing is very fast even 
with large directories.

Loading directory listing in a separate thread would be possible, but 
from my experiments, it adds too much overhead, due to synchronization 
issues.

BTW: nautilus 2.10 doesn't freeze during the directory loading stage, as 
that's done in a separate thread in gnome-vfs. What can make the UI feel 
'freezed' is the icon loading and view layouting, which is done in the 
main thread.

The icon/tree view layouting is also the most problemtic thing when 
talking about large directories. With what we currently have for 
ExoIconView and what GtkIconView 2.8 has, this is very slow.

Benedikt