Time to Build

Claudio did some interesting profiling (and patching) of the BookmarkFile implementation in GLib — so kudos to him and Felix.

one thing that he noted is:

However, I still have the feeling that letting ~\.recently-used.xbel grow without control is very, very wrong. In my laptop, this file is about 5MB, which accounts for ca. 9000 files(!).

this is very true, but I feel it needs some context. when I first wrote the RecentManager code I only had the EggRecent implementation as a comparison; the old EggRecentModel had an hardcoded limit of 500 items stored per file. limiting on the number, instead of the age of an item inside a recently used file list did not feel right, so I thought about hardcoding a limit of 30 days — but stopped short of doing it because I realized that hardcoding limits at the toolkit level was not a good idea:

  • application developers will not be able to change it in any way
  • users will not be able to change it in any way
  • system administrators will not be able to change it in any way

just to give a few examples: while I was still writing the RecentManager inside libegg, Alex Graveley was writing Gimmie. Gimmie had ((and might still have — I haven’t checked it for a while now)) a local document and application history that could allow you to go back in time of months; had I hardcoded a limit, the Gimmie developers would have needed a new implementation, defeating the purpose of shipping the RecentManager inside GTK+ to cut down the amount of code replication.

hardcoding limits is also something that makes it hard, or even impossible, for users and administrators to control; I might want a 30 days limit, but other might want a 90 days, or a 7 days — or even a 1 day limit. some might not even want to save the recently used files at all (think kiosks).

I don’t believe in strictly hardcoding policies in the toolkit; providing fallbacks is perfectly fine, but preventing people from actually having different settings is akin to convince everyone that you’re right and they’re wrong.

still, this doesn’t solve the problem at hand, that is the current lack of policy.

what I’d like to see is some process taking care of purging the old entries, using some key inside gconf, at the end of the session; gnome-settings-daemon would fit the role for GNOME, and other desktop environments using GTK+ could provide the same functionality ((if you’re not using a GTK+ based desktop environment you’re either using the same spec used by GTK+ so you can provide your own way of purging the cache, or you’re using another way to store the recently used files, so the size of the file saved/read by the RecentManager will not bubble out of control so easily — and you can still flush it yourself)). after all, gnome-settings-daemon should already flush the thumbnails cache — it wouldn’t be much of a complication.

3 Replies to “Time to Build”

  1. @marius: yes, obviously. a cleanup might just be bound to a timeout of 24 hours, or at every session end — whichever comes first.

  2. I removed GtkRecent* from my application because it caused freezing, often more than for a second, on load and save. A solution would be a daemon or whatever entity which would manage the file and would tell the applications what they need. Not a daemon which would clean something up after every single application reads and writes that file bazillion times, allocating gajillion chunks of memory while doing that.

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