Re: Running function asynchronously in gjs

[Per <pmknutsen gmail com>]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 10:44 PM, <philip chimento gmail com> wrote:

On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 10:23 PM Per <pmknutsen gmail com> wrote:

Is there a way I can run a command asynchronously in Gnome _javascript_?

There is Gio.Subprocess, but it would be better to do all this without shelling out in the first place. It's not good to spawn hundreds of processes at once, synchronously or not! Here's some (untested) code that might help you:

 

​Thanks! I would never have figured this out. The code worked great as-is. No more Gnome shell freezing while running the loop.​

This code still may have a problem; you'll want to avoid running hundreds of threads at the same time, all doing file I/O. To solve that, you could consider using recursion instead of a loop; start with an array of files that you want to process, pass it into a function with the above code, then in the callback to set_attributes_async(), pop the processed element off the array and do the same thing again until the array is empty. That way, the files will all be processed sequentially and asynchronously.

​Yes, this is a better solution. I'm testing on hundreds of I/O threads, but the code may have to run thousands of these updates in edge cases. As they're not time-sensitive, executing them sequentially and at low priority seems to be preferred.

Thanks again for the excellent solution!​