Mutlitheaded Thumbnail Generation (Is it really Faster?)
anyone with a quad core (I'm running a dual core) notice any speed diff in thumbnail generation?
I'm considering a Quad Core setup, just want some valid reasons, I use the thumbnail feature extensively.
How much difference it makes probably depends on the number of files.
Since you have dual CPUs already why not do a test to see how 1 and 2 threads differ? (Sometimes using more threads than CPUs can have an improvement as well. Depends on the types of files.)
If there isn't much difference between 1 thread and more threads, for the types of files you are interested in, then you probably won't see any benefit from another 2 CPUs. If there is a big difference then you probably will see a benefit. (Of course, at some point the bottleneck will be how fast your HDD can read the files, but where that is depends on the types of files being thumbnailed and also the image libraries, video codecs or whatever involved.)
(Remember to clear the thumbnail cache between tests. Don't turn it off completely as saving the thumbnails into the cache can account for a large part of the thumbnail generation time for some types of images, especially if you have the lossless thumbnails option turned on.)
(Remember also to do the tests a few times to make sure you don't see a big speed-up that is really due to the operating system caching the files in memory after a previous test.)
Good suggestion, I actually thought of doing the single vs dual thread test as I was writing the message, but your suggestions will add to the accuracy of my results. I'm testing on jpeg, tiffs, and psd's primarily.