[KPhotoAlbum] Startup performance

[Robert Krawitz]

On 10/13/20 1:29 PM, Tobias Leupold wrote:
> Question is if really need to optimize things furtherly. Speaking of myself, I
> have a "normal"(?) "photos we take along the year and during vacation"
> database with about 12,000 photos. It resides on NFS, on my home LAN's NAS. On
> a classical hd. Which should be -- performance-wise -- the worst combination
> of all. Startup takes like one second though (or maybe one and a half ;-)

Again, it depends on use case.  Pro photographers (which I'm not, although I can get away with
calling myself semi-pro) tend to shoot a lot of volume.  A lot of them also summarily discard a lot
of volume, but it depeonds upon just what they do.  I don't think we have a really good idea about
our community.  Remember that I'm a performance nerd and have a rather large database, so it's
something I care about.  But it might not be our biggest concern now.  The startup time is certainly
not pathological, and I think we've cleaned up most of the other real performance problems.  Perhaps
that's not what we want to focus on now.  But paying down technical debt tends to make it easier to
make bigger improvements.

(I'd still like to get my current MR merged; the performance improvement is not negligible for
certain types of uses.)

> Don't get me wrong, I surely don't want to impair Robert's effort! But at a
> certain point, I think one should reflect how many users would take a real
> benefit from further (deeper) changes, and if it's worth it ...