Re: [Nautilus-list] Icon factory caching

[Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com>]

on 10/5/01 1:01 PM, Alex Larsson at alexl redhat com wrote:

> The icon factory currently only caches unused icons for 10 seconds. I
> think this is about the right time since we want to conserve memory, but
> the problem is that each time you drop the icon from the cache, re-reading
> it needs to stat a whole lot of files looking for the actual icon file.

Where does that 10-second value come from?

> What i think we need to do is to have a cache inside the icon cache that
> caches the filenames of the icons. So that we don't have to look around
> for the icons so much. This is a lot smaller than keeping the actual
> icons around, so it shouldn't matter that much. We can even cache negative
> hits (most icon-names have no specific icon for them) as NULL, thereby
> using very little memory.

I agree completely. That's exactly what I was planning to do after Alan
Cox's analysis originally pointed to this problem. I never got around to it,
but we should figure this one out.

The trick is to figure out what the key for this new cache is. There are a
lot of parameters to the "look for icon file" process, so it's not
immediately obvious what would be in that key.

My only worry is that we would ideally want the cache to be invalidated if
someone added icons, and it would be nice to allow adding icons without
restarting Nautilus. But that's a minor point compared to this area that
needs major optimization.

    -- Darin