[svlug] Photo sorting software

[Joe Buck]

On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 05:05:29PM -0700, Karen Shaeffer wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 04:19:03PM -0700, Joe Buck wrote:
> > 
> > I don't know if they fixed it, but F-Spot had terrible performance
> > problems when trying to import large numbers of pictures, when I tried it
> > a while back, including trying to make new copies and using so much memory
> > that it paged heavily (I tried to import my collection of 2000 or so
> > images, taken with a 2Mpixel camera).  This was at least a year ago and
> > maybe things have improved since then, though.
> 
> Hi Joe,
> 
> So, you are running an application (F-Spot) on a host system (presumably)
> running linux. And your data (the photos) exceeds the physical ram
> available on the host platform -- so the kernel starts paging.

My data only exceeded the physical RAM available if an app is so stupid as
to try to maintain all the data in RAM at one time.  The app is trying to
build an on-disk database.  There's no reason for it to ever have more
than one image in memory at a time.  Actually, there was also no good
reason for it to make a new copy of each image, thereby doubling the disk
consumption; it could have made hard or symbolic links if it required
a particular file layout.

In any case, the machine had 512Mb RAM.