Icon theme scalability ...

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Owen,

On Thu, 2003-05-15 at 23:44, Owen Taylor wrote:
> A surprisingly difficult part of the icon theme code ...

	Which reminds me; one of the things that I would very much like to see
in the gtk+ design is icon collections of some sort; it's horribly
inefficient and a terrible idea to have your icons scattered all over
the disk in lots of tiny files, of the order ~400 - 800 bytes each.

	What we currently have seems to scale ~fairly well - but I would
suggest this is because gtk+ is only used in 'small' apps. Having worked
on OO.o and with the prospect of another ~600+ distinct new themable
icons arriving shortly (~an order of magnitude increase) - it seems to
me that we are going to need something that will scale to icon-bundles.

	The simple seek time penalty of fetching ~600 scattered icons can
approach 6 seconds - particularly on a laptop; quite without the pain of
the umpteen map/unmap/read kernel overhead for each.

	FWIW,

		Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot