Re: patch nag: Multithreaded thumbnail loading

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Sun, 2007-09-02 at 11:59 +0200, Christian Neumair wrote:
> I've attached a patch to bug 104224 [1] that implements multithreaded
> thumbnail loading. I'd appreciate some comments.
> 
> Do not confuse this with the thumbnail cache issue discusses in recent
> blog entries, we'll implement another solution to that.
> 
> [1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=104224

It seems a bit late in the game for this release, but seems like a good
idea.

Some quick comments from just glancing over the patch:

I don't think the immediate_thumb_loading argument is needed. We should
just always read it async.

Why are you implementing thumbnail reading as a thread? Why not use the
existing async i/o machinery in gnome-vfs. 

thumbnail_loading_thread_func() uses a lot of nautilus stuff in a
thread, which is not possible. Nautilus just is not threadsafe in this
fashion. Threads can only do really low-level stuff. 

Does is_loading_thumbnail really need to be its own thing? Can't we just
re-use is_thumbnailing (that is after all what we're doing from a
highlevel perspective).

Maybe break out the is_loading pixbuf generation code to a helper
function.

Maybe the nautilus_thumbnail_prioritize() stuff can be used or extended
to prioritize loading of thumbnails for currently visible icons.