Hey guys, I'll try not to rant and stay constructive...
Since 2.23.1, gnome-settings-daemon contains a housekeeping plugin that clean the .thumbnails. Even if it looks fair, it really makes the F-spot usage awful to the point it's basically unusable. The plugin does something like this: - clean the thumbnails older than MAX_AGE (default to 60 days) - clean the oldest thumbnails until the cache size is under MAX_SIZE (default to 64MB) A large thumbnail takes ~70K, meaning that it'll keep less than 1000 thumbs. By f-spot user standards, a collection with 1000 pictures is a really small one, the (guessed) average sitting around 12k, and some users are reporting some 50k images collection. F-Spot is built to not rely on the thumbnail presence and regenerate them once needed, but regenerating thousands of thumbnails takes hours, slow the main loop, generate a lot of disk I/O, ... As long as this plugin stays as is, we only have one choice available: shout "fuck you standards" and move our thumbs out of .thumbnails. But I think we can figure out an arrangement: 1) the MAX_SIZE should be set to 0 by default, so the cleaning is only done one the thumbs age 2) a) either change the comparison function to check for atime instead of mtime b) or, at every f-spot startup, touch all the thumbs we could need This means the housekeeping will housekeep way less (still eating user disk space) and, for f-spot users a) images not accessed during the last MAX_AGE will need to regenerate their thumbs or b) thumbs will only be regenerated if you did not used f-spot in the last MAX_DAYS days. Please do not underestimate this issue, as it affects more than f-spot, as f-spot will continuously regenerate its thumbs, the other thumbs (pdf on your desktop) will need to be regenerated every time too. regards Stephane PS: looks like atime won't work for people caring about disk IO and running with noatime f-spot bug: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=547190 g-s-d bug: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=551944 _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
