KIconLoader Optimization Idea

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Sunday 05 June 2005 15:45, Luke Alan Sandell wrote:
> Hi, my name is Luke Sandell, and I am a student at Appalachian State
> University looking for a project to do for Google's Summer of Coding. I had
> an idea for optimization but I wanted to run it by this group before I
> decide.
>
> My idea deals with the never-ending saga of application startup times. From
...
> What do you think? If this is not a good idea, feel free to suggest others.

the topic of improving icon loading has been discussed already several times.
Using an icon server and sockets or pipes to communicate with it and transfer 
the icons through them will be slower than just reading the files from disk.
Shared memory is probably faster, nevertheless you have to talk to the server 
so that it can actually load the icon. And you have to make sure that 
everything stays consistent, that the apps don't crash if the iconserver 
crashed, race conditions etc.
It's not sure that this will improve performance.

A lot of time is also spent by just searching the icon. 

Maybe a binary archive of all/many/most used icons which is autogenerated when 
icons are installed and which can be mmaped might be another idea (like 
ksycoca). Disk space is cheap, maybe they could even be cached uncompressed.

Bye
Alex 
-- 
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