[openbeos] Re: Tracker icons

Helmar Rudolph <news@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Axel Dörfler wrote:
> > Ever opened a mail folder with 1000 items? 
> So what keeps you guys from limiting the result set to -say- 200
> entries? In MySQLFront, all SQL queries yield 50 rows by default. In
> PhpMyAdmin it's 30. "Want more? Click here". Same as scrolling down,
> so not even 'expensive' in terms of motorics.
> Difficult to think outside the box when you're sitting inside, I
> guess. ;) (not meant personally)

That would be a solution for more than 10000 items, but please not 
before, that would just be extremely annoying - but it heavily relies 
on how you work with files, anyway. Say you make a query for all mp3 
files above a certain bitrate - you certainly don't want to split the 
task to downsample them into smaller parts, you want all the results, 
and you want the operation applied to all of them at once.

You can't (easily) compare cheap solutions for slow web frontends with 
the highspeed channel you have to your hard drive - it's not really an 
advantage, it's a restriction you impose to make the interface working 
at all.

> Following up on my own mail, while the reader is perusing the first
> entries, the OS can preload./cache the next result set. The user is
> the slowest item in the chain anyway.

That's how Tracker does it. The real problem is that the file system 
doesn't return the files in the sort order that Tracker needs, but in 
its own native order (which is alphabetically ordered ASCII for BFS) - 
so the short excerpt you can see at once may change while new entries 
are being populated.
It also doesn't know beforehand how many files the query will return, 
so the slider will shrink over time instead of showing the real amount 
of files instantly.

And that's two problems not really solvable with the current system, 
we'll need to reinvestigate that problem for R2. Looking up files fast 
is a major concern, anyway (with queries).

Bye,
   Axel.

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