since i probably tend to make this more technical than any reader would like to, here’s the take home message:
- much faster import of folders
- much faster thumbnail creation for first-time images
- much improved scalability wrt concurrency
- much improved scalability wrt total number of images in your database (should be good up to around 500 million images)
- much improved robustness (no more deleting ~/.cache/darktable/mipmaps all the time, yay)
some context:
darktable’s light table mode shows you your image collection in arbitrary order and filtered by arbitrary queries to the underlying database. that means that there is quite some uncertainty about which thumbnails you are going to need in the next second. so we rely on a caching mechanism that stores a few thumbnails, regenerates them as needed, and evicts not so frequently used thumbnails from the cache.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.darktable.org/2011/10/a-new-caching-backend/