As part of the .eap to .desktop conversion, raster wants me to redo the relevant caching to suit. He has made many "eap caching needs fixing" noises in the recent past, so maybe a fresh start is needed at this point. This is a discussion and design document. Major parts of it where sent to the devel list but got no response. Raster said to put it in here, and keep it up to date with whatever information and design is relevant. The problem - It's really the E_App structure as defined in e_apps.h that may need caching, no matter what their source. I say "no matter what their source" because at the moment the sources are .eap files and .desktop files, and at some unspecified date in the future .eap files might go away. I say "may need caching" because this is a fresh start, do they really need caching? To answer that last question we need to look at all the places that use E_Apps and check to see if those uses are performance critical. Then we need to see how much time it takes to load an E_App from it's source. Grepping through the source code shows that E_App is used in the ibar, engage, and mbar modules, plus in E itself. Devilhorns tells me that mbar will be replaced, so I will ignore that for now. HandyAndE tells me that the stand alone version of engage is deprecated, so I can ignore that. Both ibar and engage essentially do the same things with E_App, so I'll speak about those in generic terms. I'll also try to avoid spending time fully groking all the code that uses E_Apps, as I have some time pressure here. That's why I'm thinking out loud, if I miss something, other devs will point it out. Interesting that neither entangle, nor the stand alone eapp_edit came up in the grep results. There may be other things that deal with application icons in their own way. I'll ignore them for now. I know raster will say "engage entangle and such ar not part of corr e, ignre them". Entangle and the stand alone eapp_edit are now obsolete, as they where not included in the .desktop update. Ibar and engage both display a handful of application icons, allow the user to click on those icons to start the application. Ibar runs a "starting application" animation, and engage keeps track of open windows that belong to all applications, but tries to keep the open window icons next to the application icon if it has one for that application. I don't know if ibar uses the freedesktop.org startup notification spec, some other method, or just runs the animation for an arbitrary time. Either way, there are three operations in these modules that use E_Apps - show the icon, start the application, and match newly created windows with the E_App. E also needs to do those three operations, and more. Menus, winlist, pager, exebuf, and borders all need to show the icon. Menus and exebuf need to start the application. When a window is opened, it needs to be matched to it's E_App to show it's icon and other things. Exebuf needs to search through all the E_Apps looking for matches to the partially typed in command. EFM needs to show an icon for any .eap or .desktop it is currently displaying, maybe needs to run the application. The built in eap editor needs to read, display, and save all the application icon information. These operations fall into two distinct categories - dealing with one E_App at a time, or searching through all E_Apps with arbitrary search criteria. One at a time is often done in user time (the user only operates one icon at a time) so caching is not so important there. Searching through all E_Apps is an expensive operation that should be optimised as much as possible. Note that I count the showing of menus as the later category, as the user may want to quickly access many sub menus full of E_Apps. Since the source of the image data used for the icon can be something that needs time to decode, at the times when lots of icons are being used at once (exebuf and menus mostly) we probably want that image data cached for speed as well. The searching through all E_Apps can occur on data that is part of the original file that is the source, so an in memory search will be a lot faster than any file searching. So the problem is - as fast as possible search through all the E_Apps, no matter what their source, and give access to all the information they have ,including image data. Since this is useful in the "one at a time" category, might as well use the same method there to. The issues with possible solutions - An in memory cache of all E_App information is needed. Since the information that could be used to search this cache can be quite arbitrary, hashes and other such structures may not be useful. On the other hand, some sort of index mechanism may be useful for the most common searches, and those that need to be quickest. Lets try to come up with some numbers. The eap torture test involves over two thousand .eaps, and that's from a full install of SuSE 9.3 Pro. Certain distros have just as many applications, or more, and they are growing all the time. 120x120 pixels is probably the largest commonly used icon size, 32 bits per pixel to include the alpha channel. I have seen .desktop files up to 25 KB in size, but that includes all the translations for name, comment, and keywords, something that is not currently stored in E_App. A much more common size is 2 - 4 KB, but that still mostly is for the name translations. Note, .desktop files only include the name of the icon, not the image data itself. I use the .desktop files for this part of the discussion because they include all the non image data that is typically in an E_App. 1 KB is probably maximum storage requirement for non image, single translation E_App data. That could be a maximum of 56 KB per E_App, and possibly 100 MB for the entire cache including image data. Ouch, no wonder raster suggested mmaping the cache file. Note, this is a likely maximum for those people that install two thousand applications and like really big icons. I have over two thousand applications installed, and I like the icons in engage to zoom out really big. B-) Typical users will require a much smaller amount of data. The original caching strategy uses multiple caches, on a per directory basis, but still has a single cache for the all directory, the one with all the .eaps in it. raster has mentioned that a single cache might be a better solution. With .desktop files scattered all over the place, a single cache is more desirable for searching purposes. This does raise some interesting issues. While .eap files have in the past been per user, the majority of .desktop files are likely to be system files, mostly unchanging, but with new ones added whenever new software is installed. The user can create their own, and override system ones. There is also the translations to deal with. Do we include only one translation in the cache? Do we have a system cache and per user caches that allow overrides? Do we really need image data in the cache? Although the freedesktop.org spec says that the user chooses a single icon size, in practise the various things that render icons render them at different sizes. There is the cache update strategy to consider. The current one causes problems. Raster has thought about changing to no auto update, but with a manually triggered update. I would prefer automatic updates that work smoothly and without great pauses in the operation of the wm, as that gives the users less to complain about. Maybe we can make use of the thumb nailing stuff? Answers to these questions will help choose a caching mechanism. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ecore_desktop_paths USED BY: All of the ecore_desktop code. WHEN: At startup. They hardly ever change. ISSUES: The use of GNOME and KDE apps to figure out some of the paths. They are curently commented out, and guesses are made. SOLUTION: Go with the guesses, run the apps later to correct the guesses. Cache the results to disk. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ecore_desktop_menu USED BY: "Applications" menu and "Applications" config dialog. WHEN: The menus are parsed at first startup, then manually by the dialog. ISSUES: When new applications are installed, will need to update. SOLUTION: Parse them during idle time. Monitor relevant directories. ~/.e/e/applications/menu/all is the results cached to disk. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- icon themes USED BY: The icon theme config dialog. WHEN: When the icon theme config dialog is started. ISSUES: The actual icon theme currently in use is a small amount of info that can always be in ram, and is quick to get at startup or theme change. It's the complete list of themes that are currently installed that can take ages to find. The list itself should also be small. SOLUTION: Find them during idle time, and finish the job async when the dialog is started. Monitor the icon paths for the installation of new themes. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- icons USED BY: Whenever an E_App is displayed and others. WHEN: On demand. ISSUES: Combined .edj and FDO searching. FDO searching can take a long time. Things that display lots of icons wont want to wait for all those complex searches. SOLUTION: e_app_icon_add() should be used everywhere, and it should register a rectangle for use by the icon. The caller then shows an empty icon. A thumbnailing style process then does all the searching, and does the fm2 bouncy icon thing when the icon is found. The results of the search should be cached somewhere on disk for future reference. That needs to be nuked when the user changes icon theme. Changing the icon theme currently does not update all displayed icons. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- .desktop files USED BY: E_Apps and others. WHEN: Whenever the E_App needs to be read from disk. ISSUES: Currently a fairly simple in memory hash of them is kept. Since each Ecore_Desktop holds a hash of the fields, this can be expensive in memory. Also, we would like a pre parsed binary on disk cache for the sheer speed. ~/.e/e/applications/all is a directory with all of them that are for E_Apps, some are just links to system files. SOLUTION: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- E_Apps USED BY: Menus, bars, borders, exebuf, lots of other places. WHEN: Currently all read in at startup time. Should change this to an idle time task. Still need to read in them all near startup time though. WE need all of them for searching. ISSUES: The current eap caching code is not up to scratch, and the .desktop conversion didn't help. It does hide some other bugs though, so that needs to be cleaned up first. We need quick sorted access to all Apps on the system. Things like menus and bars need quick access to the ones in their .order files. As mentioned above, we need quick searching of them all. SOLUTION: Nuke the existing cache code. Replace with...