Improved thumbnailing performance in Thunar/tumbler

[jp.guillemin]

built and tested, works so far

Will report bugs if any

JP


On 02/07/2011 10:35 PM, Jannis Pohlmann wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I pushed a branch to git today that dramatically improves the
> thumbnailing performance in Thunar:
>
>    http://git.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/log/?h=jannis/thumbnailer-improvements
>
> At the moment, Thunar generates thumbnail requests whenever an item is
> being rendered on the screen. This happens a lot even when the item is
> only visible for a very short time (like when scrolling very fast).
>
> This would be ok if the thumbnail requests didn't interfere with
> Thunar's main loop so much. But they do since all the (grouped) requests
> and (individual!) replies are received in the main loop and not by a
> worker thread. So that's really bad.
>
> Nick and I did some thinking about this at FOSDEM and on the train back
> I started implementing our idea. It is described here:
>
> http://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.10/roadmap/thunar#improve_tumbler_integration
>
> Basically, it only generates a request when either the view size or the
> current folder changes or when the items that are visible have been
> visible already for a short time (175ms at the moment). So we do not
> send request while the user is scrolling and we *always* cancel
> requests as soon as scrolling starts again and also when the view size
> or folder changes. This is much better than anything we had in the past
> actually!
>
> We now also clean up the thumbnail cache (~/.thumbnails) by deleting
> thumbnails when their corresponding original files are deleted. And we
> copy and move thumbnails when their original files are copied or moved.
> This way we don't have to regenerate the thumbnails unless files are
> replaced or their contents change. This also works with linking, not
> just copying and moving.
>
> Please give this branch a bit of testing. Perhaps (but just perhaps) we
> can backport it to 4.8 as well. But it's a rather complex modification,
> so it really needs to be tested well (and with lots of files and all
> kinds of surprising user actions ;)).
>
> Cheers,
> Jannis
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