[Digikam-users] lots of photos and startup time

[Andi Clemens]

I tested this startup issue again and these are my results for a 50.000 images 
collection:

1. MarbleWidget: 6s
2. Database Scan: 13s

I disabled MarbleWidget and tested it again, yes it is faster.
To measure the startup time, you need to always drop the disk caches, 
otherwise the results are useless. As root:

sync
echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

I then moved the AlbumManager::startScan() into a slot, that is called 100ms 
after the DigikamApp constructor has been run.

This way it feels faster, the only drawback now is that the app appears empty, 
and the images begin to fly in.
Still much better than waiting over 22 seconds for digiKam to appear.

I guess the best would be to have album scanning in its own thread, so that 
scanning can be started while DigikamApp() is running through.

Is this possible? Can we run this in a separate thread?

I will attach the patch to this mail, so you can test it. On smaller 
collections it works fine, on bigger a thread might be a good solution.

Andi

On Tuesday 07 July 2009 11:37:54 Jacek Poplawski wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I use Digikam to organize my photo collection and manage all the photos,
> the main problem is startup time. I have more than 20.000 photos on disk.
> Well in fact I have even more if I include archives from last years. But I
> put only these 20.000 in Digikam collections.
>
> When I start Digikam it takes _minutes_, if I just want to find one single
> photo I need to wait few minutes first. Or use different application like
> geeqie (I store photos as RAW files, but geeqie knows how to show them).
>
> I disabled checking for new files at startup but still it takes lots of
> time to just read the database.
> Picasa doesn't have this problem.
>
> Is it a bug? Should I just put less files in Digikam collections and
> organize them by file manager instead Digikam?