Re: How to handle long I/O operations

[Markus Lausser <sgop users sourceforge net>]

On Sun, Aug 12, 2001 at 08:58:04PM -0700 Tara M wrote:

> Hi, what you described sounds similar to a common situation that
> I've dealt with. I'm not sure if our design would be applicatable
> to your situation, but it's a very simple approach.
>
> We have a primary management function that handles all per ``cycle''
> instances that's called by GTK+ timeout. This timeout function
> is to a short interval and the function handles the following:
>
> Whenever a callback function generates a `job', a new structure
> is alloated to the job list, the members of this structure are
> filled with the important data, ie the FILE pointer if you were
> downloading a file for example.
>
> However once the job structure is allocated and set up (ie
> a file being opened), the callback returns immediatly and does
> nothing else.
>
> Then as GTK+ control returns to toplevel, our management timeout
> callback function is called, it then handles the list of jobs
> per `cycle'.
>
> I hope the tip helps you, let me know if you need a more detailed
> explaination. Because this approach is very fundimental and dosen't
> require anything fancy other than using GTK+'s timeout callback.

Instead of using cycles in a GTK timeout function you could use the
gtk_idle_add() function where you pass the "job" argument (fd, etc.).
I think this would be faster if you want to load something from disk.

Markus.