[Digikam-users] Digikam slow

[Dotan Cohen]

On 08/12/2007, Andreas Weigl <Andreas.Weigl at silicoids-world.de> wrote:
> One thing you could test.
>
> 1. Create two albums with only a couple of pictures (e.g. 5 each)
> 2. View both albums in digikam (the thumbnails should be cached now).
> 3. Open a command line and type "touch testfile"
> 4. View both albums in digikam again
> 5. In command line do "find ~/.thumbnails -newer testfile"
>
> If find prints some files then new files have been written or changed. If
> their are no new files than the caching in general works.
> I did this on my system. No new files here.

No new files.

> If you do not get any files you can do the same test with your big albums.
> If there are new thumbnails you either hit a limit or the caching doesn't work
> properly.

I ran Recreate Thumbnails, then touch testfile, then browse a few
directories. Sure enough, there are some new files in ~/.thumbnails.
So I've either hit a limit or there is a caching problem. How can I
test that?

> How many files do you have in .thumbnail?
> find ./~thumbnails -type f | wc -l

In ~/.thumbnails/large there are 5082 files.
In ~/.thumbnails/normal there are 4531 files.
Contrast that with 10825 files currently in ~/pictures/digikam

> How long does an
> ls -l
> in your .thumbnails directory take?

An instant. However, in ~/.thumbnails/large it took 3.5 seconds, and
in ~/.thumbnails/normal another 3.5 seconds.

> I'm a unix admin and one problem my customers usually have is that they do not
> clean their directories. In some cases they have over 60000 files in a
> directory. ls is going smooth, but "ls -l" (reading the file meta data) is
> slow as hell. I don't think thats your problem, because I would expect a high
> system load and you didn't have one.
> You can not clean the .thumbnails directory (you cache would be gone). But I
> saw that "all files" are in one directory. A structure like squid or postfix
> is usally much more performant.

Is that something that I can arrange, or would it be an internal digikam issue?

Dotan Cohen

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