Re: Possible speed enhancement

["Milosz Derezynski" <internalerror gmail com>]

Hey Alex,

Sorry i didn't really mean to say it like that. I at least know how
much work you put into
Nautilus over the years (the GIO migration alone was outstanding work).

I will however try to profile it to see if there maybe isn't still
something that could be improved regarding
listing files (i will probably first try to do this with FileChooser
as it is also rather slow).

Regards,
M.

2008/10/2 Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>:
> On Thu, 2008-10-02 at 00:26 +0200, Milosz Derezynski wrote:
>> I just would like to add that the argument "Nautilus/FileChooser
>> wasn't design for X/Y/Z" is a really bad one, just by principle.
>>
>> FileChooser and Nautilus take around 4-5 Seconds to display my
>> "Pictures" folder which contains *only* around 150 pictures. Clearly
>> this is annoying (on a SATA-2 500GB drive, 2GB RAM, 2x Athlon 64 X2
>> 4400+ CPU, running GNOME). An implementation should always aim to be
>> as fast as possible, hiding behind intentions only means to be lazy.
>> On the other hand if you'd say you don't want to spend time optimizing
>> this it'd be ok but just saying it wasn't made for this and that
>> sounds like an elusion.
>
> All programming is about choice. If you optimize for top speed instead
> of features you should list only the name of files and no more
> information[1]. That is really fast. If you like more features you loose
> performance, more for each feature you choose to have. The decision made
> that is discussed above was that showing the right type of files that
> have no extensions is more important than performance showing files with
> no extensions, and has nothing at all to do with lazyness. Given this
> choice we should of course aim to be as fast as possible, but we should
> not allow only performance affect our decisions about user visible
> behaviour.
>
> Now, I don't claim that nautilus is the fastest thing in the universe,
> and if you have a case where its slow, be my guest and try to profile
> and optimize it. However, having spent several years mainly working on
> nautilus optimizations I get kinda annoyed at outbursts like "being
> lazy". They are for sure not a good way to get me to fix something
> you're interested in.
>
>
> [1] This will minimize i/o in that you only need readdir() not stat()
> calls. This is similar to how the sniffing causes even more i/o than the
> stat() call.
>
>



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