Re: Thumbnailing speed

[Hans Petter Jansson <hpj novell com>]

On Tue, 2007-01-23 at 23:26 +0000, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-01-23 at 17:20 -0600, Hans Petter Jansson wrote:
> > On Mon, 2007-01-22 at 20:35 -0600, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> > > El mar, 16-01-2007 a las 11:05 +0000, Bastien Nocera escribi�> I was ready to say: "most definitely", but that probably wouldn't be
> problem, as it's CPU time that's being counted, not wall-clock 5
> seconds.

Point. As long as the timeout is adequate for slow CPUs, it's fine with
me, then.

> I'll reiterate that it should be the thumbnailers that commit suicide
> when they take too much time, not libgnomeui killing them (that's unless
> Federico shows me that it's possible to thumbnail the biggest/hardest
> videos under that time, and where the bottlenecks would be).

The problem with leaving it up to thumbnailers/metadata extractors
themselves, is that:

- You have a lot more potential points of failure.

- You'll run code that's not part of the GNOME platform.

- It's hard to do QA because there are so many possible inputs.

- When it breaks, users will file bugs against Nautilus/Beagle/etc, not
  against the metadata extractor, and bug reports are often useless even
  if you know which component is failing.

This has bitten Beagle's metadata extraction a *lot* - and it's not just
100% CPU bugs, it's also bugs that'll eat up all your memory, for
instance.

-- 
Hans Petter