Re: [Libreoffice] RFE: abolish memory settings

Hi there,

On Fri, 2010-11-19 at 09:30 +0100, Sebastian Spaeth wrote:
> I hate the options dialog in general :), but one thing that has always
> confused the heck out of me is the "memory settings" and I propose that could
> be a nice project for someone:

        :-) Sounds good to me.

> HOW am I supposed to know if 20MB for the LO graphics cache is plenty?

        Quite - and then there is the meme about upping the limit improving
performance ;-)

> And why should care about the space we want to allocate to a single
> graphics object? And even worse, what are the implications of throwing
> out these cached objects after 10 minutes? That is too much black magic.

        Right - someone gave up on auto-detecting the right options.

> LO should adapt itself to the memory available on the system, and it
> should find a sensible cache expiry policy without me having to hardcode
> some arbitrary minute number.

        Right; so there are some complexities here, but probably nothing that
we cannot address.

        My first wonder is: is it -really- slow to re-load the images as/when
we need them ? [ or when the come 'near' the visible region ] ?

> Can we do away with those settings and even better replace the
> under-the-hood with some sensible adaptive guesses?

        Right; Mozilla has exactly the same problem - though it is not that
clear to me that they do a wonderful job there either - but we should
definately look at that code too.

        Could you add a (not very easy - ie. at the bottom) hack to investigate
this, and reply CCing Taras Gleck with the link - he is the Mozilla I/O,
memory, performance genius :-) and can no doubt help us find whatever
piece(s) of code we could re-use for this.

        Incidentally - the process of finding bogus, obsolete and/or
uninteresting settings is a really good one. I would love to see them
triaged into:

        * commonly useful [ ie. stay exposed ]
        * useful but not-so-useful [ ie. for an advanced config UI ]
        * non-useful compromises that should be removed (cf. above)

        Anyone interested in picking that up ?

        Thanks,

                Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks@novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot