<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<p>Thank for all the work that went into 8.0.0!</p>
<p>I wanted to share that the slow startup time issue I observed
with an 8.0.0 pre-release remains when launching digiKam on a
laptop with a remote database and photos on a network filesystem.
It takes about five minutes from when I launch digiKam until when
the main window starts up, and most of that time is spent on the
splash screen in "Loading tools".</p>
<p>digiKam starts up much faster when the database is local.</p>
<p>I don't remember it taking this long to start up on my laptops
with previous digiKam releases. Is this expected?</p>
<p>Thanks,</p>
<p>jik<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 3/28/23 09:22, Jonathan Kamens
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:f6f24e94-1586-d44f-72d1-106fb1f01315@kamens.us">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<p>I decided to try out the 8.0.0 pre-release AppImage on the
three machines on which I use digiKam, because I was unable to
run 7.9.0 or 7.10.0 on these machines because it kept
segfaulting.</p>
<p>I eventually was able to get digiKam to launch on all three
machines, but there was some bumps and challenges along the way
which I am sharing here because this might be useful to the
developers, and because it would be interesting to hear if
others have run into similar issues.</p>
<p>On laptop1, digiKam started, but it took several minutes to
start up each time, during most of which the splash screen was
displaying "Loading tools..." and the app appeared to be talking
to the database an awful lot. The first time seemed longer.
Strace output from that first invocation (access to thumbnails
DB) seemed to suggest that perhaps it was regenerating all
thumbnails on startup.<br>
<br>
On laptop2, the first time I started it, it did nothing for
several minutes and then popped up a message which said, "You
have insufficient privileges on the database. Following
privileges are not assigned to you: [this is blank, no
privileges are listed] Check your privileges on the database and
restart digiKam."<br>
<br>
The second time, it got to the splash screen, but got stuck
there for a very long time, like a half hour, much longer than
on laptop1. Judging by what showed up in top and strace, there
were short bursts where the digikam process was busy and talking
to the database, interspersed with longer periods during which
it was idle while waiting for something. The timestamp on my
thumbnails-digikam.db file kept getting updated, so I suspect
that it was rebuilding the thumbnail database, in which case the
delays may have been lags talking to the fileserver that the
pictures are on. Having said that, I'm not sure why the delays
are so much longer on this machine than on the other machine
that was also doing this over WiFi to the same fileserver,
unless for some reason this particular laptop has slower
connectivity to the fileserver than the other one. This does
seem possible since I noticed when mounting the filesystem on
this machine that the mount took much longer.<br>
</p>
<p>Also on laptop2, the splash screen is much smaller than it
should be and the fonts on the splash screen are so small that
they are virtually unreadable. I thought this might be an Xorg
fractional scaling issue since that's a new feature and I
believe still experimental, but I turned off fractional scaling
and restarted digiKam and saw the same issue, and then I logged
out and logged back in with Wayland and again saw the same
issue.<br>
<br>
When it finally started up, it popped up the dialog telling me
it needed to download facial recognition files, but clicking the
"Download" button seemed to have no effect at least for a while,
and GNOME kept popping up its ""digikam" is not responding,
Force Quit / Wait" dialog window. The download finally happened
and then the main window interface was responsive.<br>
<br>
The third time I started up digiKam on laptop2, it still took a
while at "Loading tools..." but much less time and the timestamp
on my thumbnails DB wasn't being updated. Other things I
noticed:<br>
</p>
<ul>
<li>After the splash screen went away there was like a 15-second
delay before the main window came up.</li>
<li>After closing the main window there was like a 15-second
delay before the digikam process (which I launched by
executing the AppImage file) fully exited.<br>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Finally, on my primary desktop computer, which is connected to
the fileserver via cable rather than wifi and therefore has much
faster connectivity, digiKam started up fast without any
apparent issue. Since I've run digiKam here more recently than
on the laptops, it's possible that the thumbnail database didn't
need to rebuild here, i.e., my suspicion that there was
something in the upgrade to 8.0.0 that caused the thumbnail DB
to need rebuilding may be incorrect.</p>
<p>Hope this is useful.</p>
<p> jik</p>
<p><br>
</p>
</blockquote>
</body>
</html>