Re: [Nautilus-list] throbber out-of-process

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Andy Hertzfeld <andy differnet com> writes: 
>        Why don't we try running it in-process again to see if we think
> it's acceptable nowadays?  If it still sputters too much we can always
> switch back.
> 

Fair enough. I do see your point about the main loop though, I imagine
it could be choppy even if we fixed quite a lot of blockiness in
Nautilus. Perhaps the main loop has an inherent tendency to be a
somewhat unfair scheduler since it isn't preemptive.

Have you tried the "drop frames" thing to keep the animation smooth?
That could make a big difference. What I mean by this is that
typically animations are kept on schedule by showing the frame that
should be showing at a given absolute point in time, given an absolute
start time for playback. I haven't looked at how you're doing the
animation.

Another possibility would be to run it in a thread rather
than a process... I'm not sure of the implications though, using GTK
from two threads might open a big can of worms.

Ideally the overhead of the throbber is just the cost of one GtkImage
widget (the new 2.0 one that does animations), so it just seemed like
an easy target for reducing overhead a bit.

Havoc