[Digikam-users] Digikam slow

[Jakob Østergaard Hegelund]

On Friday 30 November 2007, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> The system: Ubuntu Feisty on AMD Duron 1.3 GHz, 1GB RAM, KDE 3.5.6,
> Digikm 0.9.2, 13,100 pictures in Digikam library which is on it's own
> disk partition. KDE thumbnails cache opened up to 100MB.
>
> The problem: Digikam is so slow that it is nearly unusable. When we
> open a folder/album in digikam we must wait 8 seconds before we see
> thumbnails. Then, they trickle in at 0.87 sec per thumbnail (200
> thumbnails in two minutes, 54 seconds on the clock). When a photo is
> deleted, we wait 8 seconds before there is any UI reaction.
>

The good news is that you wait so long, so that it is possible 
to "meter" this with very simple external programs.

Please start up a konsole with 'vmstat 1' running.

Then, open a folder/album (expected 8 second wait).

Please send the 8 lines of output from 'vmstat 1' that appeared during 
that 8 second wait. This will tell us if you're waiting on disk or CPU 
or something else.

Ok, now stop the 'vmstat 1' and type 'top' instead. Here we have a list 
of processes, sorted by their current CPU time consumption.

Now, open a new folder/album (expected 8 second wait once again).

Wait for 2 (two) updates in the 'top' konsole. Once the second update 
occur, copy the entire konsole contents. Please send this too.

This will tell us, if CPU is what we're waiting for, exactly which 
process is causing the wait.

Last but not least, you said everything else was slow on this machine as 
well...  This indicates a fundamental problem - digikam may be hit 
harder than other applications because it actually works on a lot of 
data. Could you send the output of /proc/cpuinfo, /proc/interrupts 
and /proc/mtrr ?

-- 
Jakob Østergaard Hegelund