Comments on: F-Spot performance improvements

By: RubenV

RubenV — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 10:20:20 +0000

Believe me, we *are* concerned about all kinds of performance. Unfortunately, there’s thousands of other things we have to take care of before we even get to investigating performance issues.

Now there’s a very simple way to get this fixed (and I’m especially referring to you dixon, since you mentioned to know the issues): dive in the code. Given that most of us (and there’s not much of us f-spot devs) are volunteers, we are always very glad to get extra help.

And it sure is faster than just complaining!

By: dixon

dixon — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 09:46:00 +0000

Frieder: you’re not the only one who is concerned about image displaying performance. I don’t know if it’s because of mono or is it because the way how is f-spot programmed. The performance is really crappy. I’ve just tried to program simple app to display images using java. It’s much faster, less cpu intensive – I just used default java api(buffered image), I didn’t use any threads or caching or something. Please do something about the displaying performance – it’s very slow and my laptop fan is very loud while displaying pictures.

By: Frieder

Frieder — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:32:57 +0000

Am I the only one who does not care so much about the speed of tagging, but on the speed of the actual image display? Do you guys ever actually watch the photos you’re tagging with so much care?
Honestly, rendering a dozen-megapixel image takes some time, but that’s the reason why almost any crappy image viewer out there pre-renders the next few images so that you //don’t// have to watch how the up-scaled preview image is slowly beeing replaced by the actual image.

By: Not That Anonymous

Not That Anonymous — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:18:26 +0000

Hello. The whole thing with bars and graphs are overrated.
What we need is data. For instance, bars and graphs are useless to blind people. So, a text (read: proper data) should always be there.

By: Janne

Janne — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:39:20 +0000

Good news indeed!

I first tried f-spot perhaps two years ago, and in the end it had enough problems – crashes, slowdowns – that I gave up on it. I tried it again last month and it’s now so much better that I’ve gone over to it completely. Not that there aren’t plenty of bugs and slowdowns still, but they’re no longer enough to make using it infeasible.

In fact, it’s at the point where I’ve started to toy with the idea of perhaps implementing a few features that I miss, like the ability to associate two imported images with each other so one of them is treated as a derivative of the other; or the ability to take the UFRaw parameter file from one developed raw image and apply the same parameter set to batch develop a whole set of marked raw images. I would very much want to have images with multiple versions to be visibly different from unedited images, perhaps with a hinted, abstract “stack” line shadow around those images. It would be nice, too, to have some kind of emblem showing which images have been uploaded to Flickr. And another I would like to see is for the Flickr-exporter to allow you to rearrange the uploaded image order.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:35:36 +0000

Yaay it’s faster! Now can someone please allow images to be moved instead of just copying when importing.

By: Jones Lee

Jones Lee — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:25:00 +0000

Good job, i hope the speed for reading the files to be imported faster.

By: Publius

Publius — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:36:53 +0000

“Please do have the guts to use your real name if you want to make a point. Doing it the anonymous coward way really harms your credibility.”

No, it does not. It does however seem to bother people who can’t handle constructive criticism.

Every point Anonymous made is spot-on, and none of his points hinge on his credentials as some sort of expert whom we’d need to know something more about. He’s right, and his anonymity doesn’t change that.

If you don’t like anonymous posts, then why not alter your blog so they’re not allowed, rather than barking at anonymous posters who demonstrate they have a clue? There are plenty of valid reasons for posting anonymously that have nothing at all to do with “guts.”

By: Simon

Simon — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:13:45 +0000

Mellow out anonymous – this isn’t a science paper.

Thanks Ruben. I did wonder why it was quite so slow.

Although my camera acts as a damn slow USB storage device even when you don’t start f-spot….. ho hum

By: RubenV

RubenV — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:57:31 +0000

Ian: No plans yet for articles on that. Basically it boils down to the old adagio: To know is to measure. If you notice that you’re doing *a lot* of database queries, it might be good to investigate upon that. Our problem was that change events were too coarse grained, causing way too much recalculations. Making the events more detailed led to most of the improvements.

Anders: Thanks!

Joe: It has been worse indeed. But renaming, just for that matter, sounds a bit harsh to me.

Anonymous: Please do have the guts to use your real name if you want to make a point. Doing it the anonymous coward way really harms your credibility. Anyway, you wanted exact numbers: F-Spot 0.4.4: 22.913s, F-Spot SVN: 0.514s, running on a Pentium M 1.7, on the table in my sunny garden. Fair enough? As for the 3D: Nobody cares about the exact numbers, it’s loads faster, that’s what matters. Besides, the numbers will probably completely different on your system (though SVN should always be faster).