Re: GSD should not housekeep the thumbnails



Afaik, other applications with similar problems do keep an ad-hoc cache
in ~/.cache/.

For example, banshee does keep a ~/.cache/album-art/ directory.

Since f-spot has peculiar needs, maybe it'll make sense to move its
thumbnail cache somewhere around there.

Cheers,
Matteo

On mar, 2008-09-16 at 11:34 +0200, Stephane Delcroix wrote:
> 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
> 
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