Re: Thumbnailing speed

[Hans Petter Jansson <hpj novell com>]

On Wed, 2007-01-24 at 00:18 +0000, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-01-23 at 17:43 -0600, Hans Petter Jansson wrote:

Note that I'm not having a go at Totem here, I'm just arguing that GNOME
should take a robust approach to metadata extraction in general by
rlimiting extractors.

> > The problem with leaving it up to thumbnailers/metadata extractors
> > themselves, is that:
> > 
> > - You have a lot more potential points of failure.

> But for the end-user/developer, either it works, or it doesn't.

That depends on the user's files. A metadata extractor runs in the
background and parses a lot of files, and the user has very little
control over it.

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

> Yes, and?

You're less likely to know how it works or be able or interested enough
to fix it, its release schedule is not synced to yours, and it may be
entirely unmaintained. E.g. Federico recently ran across a showstopper
bug in the 'convert' utility.

> > 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.

> Beagle's metadata extraction is in-process, the thumbnailers are
> out-of-process.

That helps a bit, but they should also be limited in the amount of
resources they can consume, since missing a thumbnail isn't a
showstopper but exhausting system resources is.

-- 
Hans Petter