Slows starting of downloading with KIO

[David Faure]

On Monday 19 December 2005 17:49, Andras Mantia wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>  I have a complaint as an user and a request to guide me how to solve, 
> if it is possible. When I want to download let's say 200 files from a 
> remote sever via FTP, it starts very slowly until the counter in the 
> dialog counts up to 200. I believe every file is stated before 
> downloading and this is slow. I've tried on with another application on 
> another OS and the downloading started almost instantly.
>  Can this be avoided or this is a central part of the KIO framework? The 
> problem is also visible if you try to copy/delete a large folder (like 
> the KDE svn checkout) on the local disk as well.

If we didn't stat the files, we wouldn't be able to know that they are files and
not directories (which would need a recursive listing). And if we wait until
an error like "this is a dir and not a file" to do that, then we can't provide meaningful
progress information - what initially looks like copying 4 "files" (urls)
ends up being "copying 3 files and then copying a huge directory full of files",
so allocating 25% of the progress to the latter phase would be wrong.

If you know those URLs are always files, then you can use KIO::file_copy to copy
them (but in that case there's no overall progress info provided by KIO, since each
FileCopyJob is about one file).

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).