The way that one uses the system may play an important role in the performance question.
I have a relatively small collection of around 16,000 images and my approach is to keep (in theory) all of my images selected on an inverse time basis (Folders>Pictures>%). Thus, as I add images my latest pieces are, so to speak, located and added on the top of the pile in plain view. Since I try not to 'break' the continuity of my storage, my memory (8 Gb.) holds-up rather well. Searching/locating images or sets of images is also quite fast. The problems start to occur for me if I jump around in the data base and call individual folders (ie. breaking-up the continuity of my 'image stack'. Having all of ones images selected initially sounds counter intuative to an efficient operation but it appears to work on my hardware; I suspect it simply keeps the cache integrity better. David On 03/28/2014 09:35 AM, Pedro Côrte-Real wrote: > 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. 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