Re: caching (was Re: [Nautilus-list] Re: Help API for GNOME 2.0)

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Sun, 15 Jul 2001, Daniel Veillard wrote:

> On Sun, Jul 15, 2001 at 02:37:44PM -0600, John Fleck wrote:
> > So are you suggesting a simple rendering of the entire document, or
> > the use of the rootid param to display sub-sections?
>
>   Well I'm just suggesting you try both and try to see how it
> affects the user experience, then select the solution accordingly.
> I'm just afraid that for small docs, chnking will slow down the
> initial rendering and force the user to click too many times
> before getting to the information. An automatically generated index
> on top of a single flat file may actually be faster to render and
> for the user to get to the informations.

I think we want to avoid a solution that doesn't use chunking.  It just
isn't very user-friendly to throw up a gigantic page when the user is
looking for a quick and easy answer to a question.  I'm also not sure that
not-chunking would completely solve the performance problem and eliminate
the desire for a cache.  (A few simple performance tests would help here.)

Once a document is in the cache, things should be very fast.  If the
processing is too slow the first time a document is processed, we may want
to come up with a way to create the cache before the user accesses the
document, such as having a process run off of cron or popping up a dialog
which asks the user if they want to create a cache of all documents
(somewhat analogous to how many help browsers have you create an index
the first time you use the browser).

Dan