icons for Settings Manager

[edscott wilson garcia]

On Wed, 2004-01-14 at 12:20, Benedikt Meurer wrote:

> Glib XML Parser is a light-weight SAX-style parser which should be quite ok 
> for our needs. I thought of letting mime-things be handled by a daemon process 
> and having a small communication library for setting up a fast UD socket and 
> retrieving the information from the daemon. This approach has some advantages, 
> just to name 2 of them (while it has some disadvantages of course):
> 
> 1) Mime config/icon files can be held/cached in memory in the daemon process 
> and need not to be parsed whenever information is required, that should lower 
> the I/O overhead and allow for faster operation (depending on the quality of 
> the UD socket implementation in the target system)
> 
> 2) Processes load only a thin wrapper library with only the socket code.

I like this idea. Currently each process has to parse the xml and create
it's own g_hash_tables. Startup times can certainly be reduced if only
one copy of the g_hash_tables is used (except for the first application
which requires and therefore starts the daemon). We only need to be
careful to resolve race conditions when two different applications both
try to start the daemon at the same time.

> 
> Using SYSV shm and IPC techniques could allow us to speed up the stuff even 
> more, for example transferring pixbufs between processes using shm segments.

Or maybe have the daemon place its g_hash_tables and icon factories in
shared memory segments so applications can access them directly. 

> 
> But this was just a thought I had last year while I was looking for an easy 
> and efficient way to bring MIME to XFce. Any comments to this?

Your ideas sound very good. At the moment I don't know how difficult
they would be to implement. It certainly sounds interesting to try and
do.

regards

> 
> > Edscott
>