Re: Is it a bug in Gio::FileMonitor?

[Владимир <cl333r gmail com>]

Thanks,
you as a developer certainly know better than me,  I'm just saying from a user's (a dev who uses gtk/gio) point of view that when there's a (whole) second delay for such a simple task as deleting or renaming a single file - something should be changed in gio and/or its monitor because even end-users notice this (somewhat ridiculous) delay (maybe you noticed how Nautilus deletes 1 single file in about a second while on same computer on Windows its file browser deletes a file instantly - might be because of this delay in the gio notification system), thus I believe someone should review the timings in gio or at least let the dev customize its behavior. As I understand set_rate_limit() was supposed to let the dev customize it but it doesn't seem to have any effect.
So I've dropped the gio monitor and started using inotify in the app I'm creating because of this (i.e. because I want end users to think/feel that my app is quick). Thanks again.

On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 12:20 PM, Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com> wrote:

On Fri, 2010-05-28 at 20:37 +0300, Владимир wrote:
> Hi,
> I've been told on the gtkmm mailing lists that it's a glib/gio issue
> (or feature) so I should ask here because gtkmm is just "a thin
> wrapper".
>
> I found that Gio::FileMonitor reports changes (like
> created/deleted/etc) to files with a delay of around 1 to 2 seconds
> and its method set_rate_limit() doesn't make a difference.
> I'm wondering whether it's a bug or a feature?
>
> Also, I tried Linux's "inotify" and it works well, that is, it reports
> changes instantly.

There are some delays and stuff inside the inotify backed to try to e.g.
coalesce delete+create pairs to moves and to generally get better
performance by not running constantly on every single event. However,
i'm not sure what exact timeouts are used, as I don't know the inotify
part of the code all that well.

However, in general you can't depend on instant feedback from the gio
file monior in general. On some systems this is not possible, for
instance we might be falling back to polling if no native file
notification system exists.

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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc
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