On Thu, 11 Jul 2002, John Levon wrote: > > background, too, so I was very disappointed to see that, on the contrary, > > image loading is done in foreground now. This is the reason I still prefer > > 1.1.6. > > Image loading is not done in the foreground...
Ok, I guess I'm not in a position to argue about this with you, but what I observe strongly ressembles a foreground process. Let me be more specific: When the place an image is to be displayed in appears on the screen for the first time, image conversion and display is triggered. The empty box representing the image initially contains a message like "converting to loadable format". Image conversion is done in the background, that is, the user interface is not affected by the running process. Moving the cursor, scrolling the canvas and opening menus works as usual. Once the image conversion is done, the image is loaded. During this (rather rapid) process, the information given in the box changes to "Loading image...", and then "Loaded. Scaling etc...". These processes seem to be done in the foreground in the sense that the user interface is completely blocked. Displacing the cursor, scrolling the canvas, opening menus, useage of dialog boxes etc is delayed until the image is loaded. The events that piled up are executed once the image appeared on the canvas. On my box (AMD K6II-266), loading takes up to a second, depending on the images. Even worse, when scrolling rapidly across a document with many images, lots of conversions are triggered. When images start to be available for loading, loading takes longer because load is high, and the sum of all the events makes for an appreciable blackout of UI availability. I hope this clarifies what I said. I might also add that in lyx 1.1 I never observed ANY lag in UI response correlated with image loading. Jan
