[KPhotoAlbum] Big performance problem with QDateTime

[Tobias Leupold]

Hi Robert!

I'm pretty sure the Qt guys are glad to see your analysis of this. At least
they really shouls be. If a simple cache inside QDateTime can cheap out 3/4 of
the computing time in our case, you can be sure it does for other use cases.

And adding the ms representation since the epoch of the date and time as a
member variable, along with a boolean one that indicates if the cache should
be recomputed next time it's requested should be trivial to add. Without
breaking the API.

Thanks for tracking this down :-)

Cheers, Tobias

Am Sonntag, 20. September 2020, 16:14:26 CEST schrieb Robert Krawitz:
> Certain kpa operations, in particular startup and home (i. e. select all
> images) appear to have slowed down drastically recently.  The problem is in
> the XMLImageDateCollection code; specifically, building the map between
> date and DB::ImageDate is very slow (the home operation is taking about 25
> seconds on my system).  This is done once at startup and whenever the
> selected set changes, for the date bar.
>
> The problem is that QDateTime comparisons, which need to be done extensively
> for map insertions, are very slow because to correctly handle timezone and
> DST issues the date/time has to be converted to milliseconds since the
> epoch.  But there have been reports of this issue for quite a while
> (https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-41714), and apparently it's
> something that upstream can't or won't fix, and I would definitely have
> noticed this earlier.  I suspect something has changed in the default
> behavior, possibly related to when I upgraded my laptop.  Perhaps the
> linear time stamp had previously been cached and isn't now.
>
> There's a local fix to the datebar issue, namely use the time since the
> epoch as the key rather than the QDateTime itself.  This results in the
> home operation now taking a second or two.  Even so, the conversion to
> milliseconds is taking about 73% of the total time of that operation.  For
> reference, the conversion had been done about 2.5E+07 times previously;
> it's now being done about 1E+06 times (with 380K images in my database).
> It also accounts for about 15% of the startup time, with the conversion
> being done about 1.4E+07 times (4 times per image).
>
> The fix really needs to be in QDateTime, to cache this.  I don't want to
> rewrite every use of QDateTime in kpa, but this one case (see attached
> patch) clears up the most egregious behavior.
>
> There's an existing bug against Qt
> (https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-75585) about this that got closed,
> but I'm going to comment on it and maybe open a new one.