[Thunar-dev] Problem with thumbnails

[Erik Harrison]

On Feb 17, 2008 12:24 PM, Erlend Davidson <E.R.M.Davidson at sms.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>
> 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.

Well, it is taking too long, and under that load the file is
"unreasonable". The whole point is to have a simple system that scales
well, and I think system load should be taken into account.

Of course, someone has to implement this or the whole discussion is moot.

> > 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
>
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-- 
Erik
"Look at me still talking when there is Science to do"