speed improvements (patch)

[Ian Monroe]

On 10/5/06, Martin Aumueller <aumuell at reserv.at> wrote:
> Thanks for your your on Amarok so far. Yesterday, I actually had the
> impression that it has become a lot snappier...
>
> But the description of your work on AtomicString makes me think that this
> would render AtomicString pretty much useless: the reason for introducing it
> was to save memory by holding only one copy of an artist's name instead of
> one separate for each track. But if you do QDeepCopys, then this advantage is
> lost. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but if I understood you correctly then
> I propose to get rid of AtomicString altogether, as it just introduces
> unnecessary complexity.

Well or at least use it only precisely where its needed. Why is
AtomicString used in more then one thread at all? The reason we have
it is for repetitive artist and album names in the playlist. Many
string loading operations do occur in threads, but perhaps the QString
should not become an AtomicString until it gets put into the playlist.

And yea, in reality Qt3's reference counting makes it virtually
impossible to not cause some race conditions. :/

Ian Monroe