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[glynor]

Is there anyway we can have DCRAW be a little more system resource friendly when thumbnailing and importing raw images?  On my Pentium D 3.2 GHz machine it is brought nearly to it's knees with any sizable number of RAW images imported whenever I switch to the Images tree item.  I see in Process Explorer, 4 separate threads of DCRAW are started, each consuming about 25% CPU time.

The only reason MC isn't completely unresponsive when this is happening is that I have a dual-core machine with gobs of RAM.

[DarkPenguin]

I'll try to knock the priority on DCRaw down when thumbnailing.

[glynor]

Thanks!   

[glynor]

Sorry to report... 

I think it's worse, rather than better.  (I take that back.)  I'm now seeing most of the child processes of DCRaw.exe fluctuating a lot more in their CPU usage.  However, I'm seeing CPU usages of 35-50% per process now (hovering in the low 40s often).  Before, all 4 would peg pretty close to 25%.  Now I'm seeing them switch around.  1-2 of them will be at 40-ish% and the others will stay below 10%.

Overall, MC feels slightly less sluggish when the Raw thumbs are building, but its still blocking the program quite a bit (selecting one file, and then another will take sometimes 1-2 minutes, though it's usually more like 10-20 seconds with this machine).  So that's I guess a little better (before it'd often be blocked for 3-5 minutes)...

Before I basically never saw CPU usage about 25% per process.  Now it's fluctuating like mad.  Also, at first it's fine (all four of the processes stay at or below 10%), but after a minute or two they start creeping up and using up the whole 100%.  It seems to get worse if I have a picture selected (rather than just viewing the list of images with nothing selected), but that could be my imagination.

(Edited to add more info at the end.)

[DarkPenguin]

That's how Idle priority works.  If CPU is available it will use it.  If you are doing nothing they should combine to use all your CPU.

Now keep in mind that there is still a lot going on with the machine.  And if you are bouncing around to other raw files and what not then they have to decode as well.

[glynor]

Yeah.  I thought as much.  Actually, after playing with it a bit more it's been fine on this system.  I am still getting the occasional thumbnailing-related UI freeze, but it's way better than it was.

It also doesn't seem to be bringing the rest of the system to a crawl as much as it was before, which was my primary concern.

If possible, you might still want to look at limiting the "maximum CPU usage" of the DCRaw process though.  I understand what's going on when it's building thumbnails and the UI doesn't respond for 20 seconds or so when I click on something.  Other, less-savvy, users are going to start clicking on stuff like mad though (especially when they're using a P4 2.0 GHz machine with 512MB of RAM rather than a high-end machine).