Fixing bugs is actually more fun than I thought. It is rewarding and seeing the bug count go down feels great. But after a few weeks of mostly hunting crashes I needed to do something different for a change.

Thus, I went after the file indexer for optimizations. As discussed in the comments of this very blog downloads and rapidly changing files in general have always been a problem – they are indexed way too often. This is a clear waste of resources. In a discussion the very good idea of introducing a delay after which to re-index a changed file was born. This is what I actually did. However, while doing that I found that it can be even more improved:

In addition to file modification events the file system can tell us when a file is closed after having been opened for writing. Thus, Nepomuk now uses that event instead. For downloads that means they will be indexed only a single time: when they are done.

So now Nepomuk will only re-index files that have actually been modified (modification event) and that have been closed (close after write event). And in addition the re-indexing is delayed for 5 seconds to ensure that we do not re-index rapidly changing files all the time.

All in all this is a great improvement for IO in Nepomuk. Thanks a lot for pointing it out and getting me on the right track. (I even backported this to KDE 4.7.3.)

In other news my former GSoC student Smit Shah added another delay: the nepomukcontroller icon in your system tray will now stop flickering in and out of activity whenever a small file is indexed. Instead it will wait a short while to ensure that some longer indexing operation is in progress. Another nice usability thingi that he will also backport to 4.7.3.

And now it is back to crash fixing for me. :)

In the meantime let me mention again that I am still looking for Nepomuk funding. So far no company has given a positive answer (funnily enough I did not get a negative yet either). I am still interested in your proposals and as always your support (which has been amazing – thank you so much):



