[Thunar-dev] Problem with thumbnails

[Erlend Davidson]

Erik Harrison wrote:
> On Feb 17, 2008 6:37 AM, Erlend Davidson <E.R.M.Davidson at sms.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>   
>>> Thunar use the generic icon for that mime type.
>>>       
>> Or, the thumbnailer should gracefully fail when overwhelmed, and let
>> Well the problem is how to tell when you're overwhelmed?  Difference
>> people have difference ideas of when a thumbnailer should and shouldn't
>> run... I think most people would say don't run if it's going to use swap
>> space, I would say don't run if it's going to adversely affect the
>> apparent responsiveness of the operating environment.  If you're running
>> a remote filesystem (fusesmb / sshfs) then the file-sizes which are safe
>> to thumbnail change dramatically.
>>
>>     
>
> Which is why I wasn't arguing for a constant file size. I figured a
> simple timeout would scale nicely.
>   
Actually that would work quite well - a setting in thunar "thumbnail 
only files which take under 5 seconds".  In order to handle the 
networked filesystems thunar would remember the size and mimetype of the 
file, and not thumbnail other files in that directory (incl. 
subdirectories) which it believes will take too long.

Two problems:
1. if you try and load X MB into machine RAM when only Y MB is available 
(Y<X) you're still going to get a crash - timeouts don't save you here.
2. with the above logic, if a machine is under a lot of load it might 
wrongly assume that a perfectly reasonable file is taking "too long" to 
thumbnail.
> What's Nautilus's solution here? We use Nautilus thumbnailers if GConf
> is available, we ought to look and see how they handle this problem -
> do the individual thumbnailers take care of it, or does Nautilus kill
> thumbnailers that misbehave?
>   
Nautilus just does it by filesize, and they never thumbnail files in 
remote filesystems.

Erlend