#45 SMP support for thumbnail generation.

[David Zaragoza Rodríguez]

Hello

Attached is a patch that parallelizes thumbnail generation in the thumbbar.

Some details:
* It uses processes instead of of threads because of the GIL in python.
* It uses NumPy arrays to exchange data between processes because GTK's pixbuf doesn't support pickle. To exchange data the pixbuf is first transformed into a NumPy array.
* In tests with a 2-cores processor I gained an average speedup of 1.68.

It was a pretty interesting exercise, maybe you could suggest other parts of the program that could benefit from parallelization? I would love to help.

Regards
David Zaragoza

[David Zaragoza Rodríguez]

SMP support for thumbnail generation.

[David Zaragoza Rodríguez]

Check for NumPy availability in system.

[David Zaragoza Rodríguez]

Oh I forgot to mention it: The patch is against SVN revision 325.