Re: [Gimp-developer] Reducing Load Time

[Tobias Oelgarte <tobias oelgarte googlemail com>]

Am 08.12.2011 14:04, schrieb Alexia Death:
> On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 2:37 PM, Srihari Sriraman<srihari29691 gmail com>  wrote:
> > Is it possible to implement this change before the release of 2.8?
> > or is it too late?
> The window to get new features into 2.8 closed long ago.
>
> Lazy loading has been on the table for as long as I have been with the
> project, but it has never been important enough or desired enough to
> attract a developer to actually implement it and its not a trivial
> change to do so its actually beneficial. One of the main catches is
> that for most brushes, to get/generate the preview you need to load it
> at least once. And once you have loaded it whats the point of dropping
> it again? Way around it would be to cache previews, but then you would
> need to manage that collection, keep it in sync with what is and isn't
> on the disc etc. Whole bunch of complications making the effort spent
> greater than the benefits. I think last time it came up the
> recommended solution for these problems was a resource manager that
> would let users load and unload resource collections on demand and
> simply limiting the resources loaded at startup. This is something
> that could even be implemented as a plugin.
It doesn't have to use a cache for the previews. Like thumbnails of big 
images the previews can be loaded rather fast. Encoding the whole 
brushes, which are usually much larger as the previews, is the time and 
RAM consuming issue.

But even implementing a cache can't be such an hard task. To check if 
some files are present or not is quickly done and the previews could 
indicate that the brush files are missing or they would be just 
removed/hidden. Quite an easy task to do, which is very much comparable 
to the "recent files" feature.

Greetings from
Tobias Oelgarte