I have the same experience. If I understand how darktable works it doesn't generate thumbnails on disk, just in memory and of course the memory is limited. That memory is however later saved to disk so regeneration isn't needed in small collections. In a big collection it's possible that the memory isn't enough to hold all thumbnails so you're constantly throwing away thumbnails you've already calculated.
I've also noticed that the lighttable view is pretty unoptimized. Refreshing it spends a bunch of time on sqlite and I get some situations after import where the thumbnails show up and disappear and then show up again. This could again be a bad interaction with the cache, where a thumbnail that's already been calculated gets evicted again. I believe this bug occurs when I scroll through a large collection which is consistent with the cache getting thrashed. I think in general the lighttable view needs a good look at how to optimize it for performance and the cache setup seems very strange to me. The on-disk cache shouldn't just be a dump of the memory cache for restarts, it should have a larger set of saved images that get pulled to memory as needed. Invalidating the whole cache when you change the maximum size of the image area also seems very strange to me. Pedro On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 1:52 AM, Warren Baird <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all > > I posted about this around a year ago - but haven't been following the list > too much lately - I did a few quick searches, but haven't seen if a lot of > progress has been made in this area. > > I have a few large collections of images - one of my tags hits almost 8000 > images. When I search on this tag and scroll through the thumbnails, some > thumbnails will show up instantly - but the majority of them will start out > as a grey box and fill in progressively - a 10x7 thumbnail grid takes about > 10 seconds to fill in. This means that if I'm scanning through the > collection looking for an image to use, it is *very* slow... It seems that > these thumbnails aren't being cached anywhere - if I restart darktable it > seems to have to regenerate the thumbnails again. > > I recently installed digikam, since I need something to manage my video > files, and I found that it handles this better - the initial display of the > thumbnails is about as fast as darktable (maybe slightly slower) - but the > thumbnails are saved - so after letting it work on my collection for a > while, I can scroll through 100's of images and see the thumbnails appear as > fast as I can scroll through the list... > > In 10s I could easily scan through about 500 thumbnails in digikam - it took > more than 30s to do the same in darktable. I've put videos of the two up at > :http://www.synergisticimages.ca/Other/Darktable-Vs-Digikam/38033945_Jbmj5r#!i=3140923506&k=28N4HWW > - both were operating off the same set of images off the same disk - > although each package ordered the images differently so it wasn't showing > the exact same set of files. > > Overall I prefer darktable a lot --- but when it comes to looking for images > to use in my art, I might have to go back to digikam for now... > > Any ideas on config changes to improve this? > > Any plans for improvement in this area? > > -- > Warren Baird - Photographer and Digital Artist > http://www.synergisticimages.ca > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book > "Graph Databases" is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their > applications. Written by three acclaimed leaders in the field, > this first edition is now available. Download your free book today! > http://p.sf.net/sfu/13534_NeoTech > _______________________________________________ > Darktable-users mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/darktable-users > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Darktable-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/darktable-users
