[KPhotoAlbum] Startup speed issues

[Jesper K. Pedersen]

On Sunday 08 October 2006 16:56, Lars Clausen wrote:
| My use of KPA has been somewhat curtailed by the slow startup -- it's
| really hard to use a small break to tag a few images.  So I did an
| analysis of the startup.  I have a collection of almost 17000 images and
| 50 videos, using the SVN version of KPA from 8/10 2006 (revision
| 593576).  This sounds very similar to bug #126506, which doesn't seem to
| have been fixed,  My speeds are:
|
| Splash screen appears: 0:05
| End of "Loading Main Window": 1:25
| End of "Searching for New Images": 2:05
| Main window appears: 2:40
| Image list appears: 3:45
|
| The discussion of the bug back in the end of May indicated that the
| index.xml file was to blame, but didn't give any indication of how to
| fix it without losing all information in it.
|
| After taking away my index.xml and building a new one, the times look
| like this:
|
| Splash screen appears: 0:05
| End of "Loading Main Window": 0:10
| End of "Searching for New Images": 0:55
| Main window appears: 0:55
| Image list appears: 0:55
Well sure, now your index.xml file does not contain any information. Try 
rm'ing all your images, and you will see that it is much faster too ;-)

Seriously, each annotation adds to start up time.
Hopefully Tuomas will get the SQL backend finished, which will solve this once 
and for all.

One improvement you may take (if you haven't done so already) is to check 
the "Choose speed over readability" in the backend tab of the configuration 
dialog. (This is for SVN, for older versions, it is called something 
like "used compressd xml file" in the general tab.

| This is obviously a lot better, now I just need a way to transfer over
| the old tags.  Doing an export doesn't seem to get me all the info I
| need, is there another way?  I can post/mail the index.xml file if it
| might help.
|
| Poking a little further, it seems that the number of tags involved makes
| a big difference.  I added to all pictures a Person tag, a Location tag
| and two Keyword tags (all the same), and now startup times are:
|
| Splash screen appears: 0:05
| End of "Loading Main Window": 3:30
| End of "Searching for New Images": 5:15
| Main window appears: 6:50
| Image list appears: 9:50
|
| So the startup time is directly proportional to the number of tags
| assigned to pictures, it seems.  This is all with a non-DB enabled
| version, since the DB isn't as I understand it stable yet.
|
| Seeing as how the "Searching for New Images" part takes about 80% of the
| startup time with a "good" index.xml, here's an idea for reducing it:
| Keep track of when leaf directories have been modified, and if a leaf
| directory hasn't been modified since last save, a) there's no new images
| in there, and b) there's no new subdirectories in there.  Thus it
| doesn't need to be scanned.  In my case, this would cut the number of
| inodes queried from about 17000 to about 250.
Do I understand you mail correct, that the searching for images part takes 
longer when you have a lot of images annotated (in contrast to not having the 
images annotated, but still around). If so, that would indeed surprise me big 
time.

Cheers
jesper.