Desktop icon grid

[Harald Judt]

Am 28.09.2011 16:38, schrieb Jannis Pohlmann:
> On Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:20:58 +0200
> Harald Judt<h.judt at gmx.at>  wrote:
>
>> Am 28.09.2011 14:29, schrieb Nick Schermer:
>>> On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 4:16 PM, Stealth<stealth at xfce.org>   wrote:
>>>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>>>> Hash: SHA1
>>>>
>>>> Hello, I was wanting to make the desktop icons move around
>>>> "freely" and not snap to a grid. I'm sending this to make sure its
>>>> not already been/being implemented (and to get some info if its
>>>> not being implemented)
>>>
>>> FYI: http://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.10/roadmap/xfdesktop
>>>
>>> Nick
>>
>> After reading that page, I stumbled over 'Improve Responsiveness of
>> File Operations'. The paragraph talks about the deletion/copy/move,
>> but I noticed that thunar became less responsive for the
>> copy/move/whatever dialog too (progress information/time estimation).
>> If you're shoving files over a slow net connection, thunar freezes up
>> sometimes which is especially bad when it's running as a daemon. Are
>> there any plans to restore the responsiveness for these things too?
>
> Remember that transferring files over the network wasn't really
> possible with earlier versions of Thunar (unless you used something
> like FUSE or NFS of course). Also, I doubt the dialog "freezes". File
> operations are implemented asynchronously, so your dialog probably just
> isn't updated as frequently as you'd expect it to.

Actually I'm still using FUSE (namely, sshfs-fuse), but it also lags 
with CIFS, and I've already seen thunar working faster with USB 
transfers too. I find it more convenient, as I can set it up 
automatically depending on the network environment and use it on the 
command line too.

It's not the dialog that "freezes", but rather the whole thunar 
instance. "Freezes" might be the wrong word, so let's just say that it 
reacts very very slow and does not repaint often enough.

>> I'm really missing the almost-instant responsiveness of the time
>> estimation dialog of pre-gvfs-thunar, now it only updates every few
>> seconds if everything goes well.
>
> Thunar updates the dialog whenever a certain small percentage of the
> total transfer amount has been copied or moved since the previous
> update. I felt like such a time frame was necessary to not cause 50% of
> CPU usage (caused by updating the dialog whenever a few bytes have been
> transfered) when running multiple operations at the same time. With
> very slow drives or network connections this will of course make
> the dialog feel less responsive.

I never experienced that high cpu usage, but then I have never started 
that many parallel operations. BTW: Windows 8 will have a great feature, 
allowing you to queue, pause and resume file operations. I think I saw 
such similar ideas here on the mailing list quite some time ago, but it 
never made it into the final version.

Is it possible to reduce that time frame somewhere and improve 
responsiveness somehow? CPU load is not a problem for me, responsiveness 
is. I'd like to have a desktop that is snappy, not laggy, even if the 
throughput suffers a bit ;-)

Harald

-- 
`Experience is the best teacher.'