Re: [Tuxmath-devel] Multithreading for rescaling title screen and menu items

[Brendan L. <bm...@ri...>]

Hi Wenyuan,

Just updated my branch with the threading--looks nice! For the sake of
portability (actually, just me and my broken Windows environment) would you
mind if I changed the calls to use the SDL_Thread API instead of pthreads?
AFAIK it's just a wrapper around pthreads on most environments, so the
implementation/performance should be identical. Let me know if you see any
problems with changing.

Cheers,
Brendan

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 7:42 AM, Tim Holy <ho...@wu...> wrote:

> Dear Wenyuan,
>
> On Monday, July 19, 2010 04:02:00 am Wenyuan Guo wrote:
> > But it should not be problem here for the latest version: hard
> > disk cache for modern OS is smart enough so that only the first read
> > of each file incurs the mechanical delay. It used to be a problem in
> > the earlier versions without SVG cache though, because the bottleneck
> > was CPU bound then, and loading and rescaling the same sprite more
> > than once add to that delay.
>
> Good point. Presumably if the cache got filled up we'd see a performance
> hit,
> but for almost any machine that can run tuxmath I doubt this will be a
> problem.
>
> > > 6. Use David's suggestion that we (at least optionally) always have
> both
> > > the --fullscreen and the --windowed resolution graphics available in
> > > memory.
>
> > After thinking over these options for a while, I think I will give 6 a
> > try: in particular, we can load all cached sprites of all resolutions
> > at the startup, possibly in a separate thread. Later resolution
> > switches will not incur the hard disk delay this way. If my theory
> > that the current 2s is mainly hard disk bound is correct, it should
> > give substantial improvement for all F10 presses in-menu.
> >
> > Now going back to some happy coding! I will update you once the
> > feature is implemented and is ready for testing.
>
> Exciting!
>
> --Tim
>
>
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