[Thunar-dev] Problem with thumbnails

[Tino Keitel]

On Sun, Feb 17, 2008 at 12:16:50 -0500, Erik Harrison wrote:
> On Feb 17, 2008 6:37 AM, Erlend Davidson <E.R.M.Davidson at sms.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> >
> > > Hehe, high-performance and large images? It is possible to load and
> > > store thumbnails inside the EXIF data AFAIK. I imagine large JPEGs
> > > will sometimes have that. The thumbnailer could check for that and
> > > fail otherwise.
> > >
> > Most images produced by a digital camera will have a thumbnail stored in
> > the exiv data (it's the same thumbnail the camera uses to display the
> > image on the LCD).  Thunar already extracts those (this came in 0.8.0,
> > and gives very good performance).
> >
> > > Or, the thumbnailer should gracefully fail when overwhelmed, and let
> > > Thunar use the generic icon for that mime type.
> > 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.

Thunar could also set a memory limit to the thumbnailer process (via
ulimit or similar), so that the thumbnailer process is killed if it
starts eating too much memory. Thunar woulld have to find out the hosts
memory size to calculate a sensible limit, though. IMHO a fixed value
would not work well here to satify all users. Another idea is a config
item where the user can set a maximum size for the thumbnailer process.

Regards,
Tino