Not at all. GUI closing is the 1st thing before any cleanup process happens (and darktable does a lot of clean up, db maintenance is small-ish part)
And thatâs UX evolution for me and you click âyesâ and poof, itâs done. Theoretical limit is your disk write speed so with 30MB of freepages and default settings Iâd believe your db pre-maintenance was ~110MB, so the time to do maintenance would be âas long as it takes to write 80MB to diskâ. In most cases itâs neglible. Would you like any kind of confirmation that itâs done? or would you rather have it by default asking at the start of darktable (so it finishes before you start working)?
Unless you brute-force closing, thereâs no way any OS would do kill on that process (since it would send SIGTERM, and weâre already closing)
Plus - db maintenance is an atomic operation for sqlite (if i remember correctly), meaning that itâs done in separate temporary file and once itâs successful it changes temp name to old file (and thatâs instanteous in todays filesystems)
Nope, and itâs impossible to âshow progressâ in any menaingfull way⊠Maybe except showing little âpliz vaitâ window and the process shouldnât take more than ~2s in bad cases
Statistics? I mean - it shows you that it can free 30 MB and once you click yes it doesnât lie
I can add another dialog with âMaintenance done good sir, 30 mb freedâ, but I personally hate those
How would you like it to be?
I personally think that asking on startup by default would be better, since asking on close creates problems youâve mentioned.
My pleasure! (TBH for cases like yours it SHOULD speed up db access a tiny bit). Especially since that whole set of patches forces code to VACUUM, ANALYZE on command + PRAGMA optimize on every closeâŠ
No, if it means popping up another window from nothing (at this point I wonât have any visual indication that DT is running, right?).
ANd also no if most of those maintenance processes run so fast - this confirmation window would pop up instantaneously after pressing yes, which would be kind of weird.
So, if shutting down the computer, as well as closing the lid (suspend), donât present any issue, Iâm ok: press yes and be happy.
Today I started darktable and then closed it, without doing anything. The maintenance windows popped up claiming 29.5 MB to be cleaned. I aswered yes.
Then I reopened darktable and closed it and, again, the same windows popped up. I repeated this a couple of times and the window always show up.
Is it normal?
No it isnât. Which version do you have? Iâve fixed some stuff around maintenance and it should fix most of the problems.
In recent PR (#4379) Iâve added some debugging info that can be enabled via -d sql option to diagnose such cases.
However - If you have newest master and still sqlite still wonât vacuum it right then try changing the option to on startup. If that fixes it then weâll have some moving around to doâŠ
In order to get the newest changes in maintenance code merged I need better descriptions for options. Since English isnât my first language I need a bit of help.
Hereâs my current propositions: maintenance_check :
shortdesc: âcheck for database maintenanceâ
longdesc: âwhen to check and ask to perform database maintenance. the 'donât ask options will simply perform maintenance if needed.â
maintenance_freepage_ratio :
shortdesc: âdatabase fragmentation for maintenanceâ
longdesc: âa minimum fragmentation ratio to perform maintenanceâ
I welcome all suggestions. Messages need to be clear and not scaring people away. for maintenance_freepage_ratio the values should be in range of [0-100] but sensible range is IMO [15-40] and I donât know how much youâd need to grind db to get freepage ratio above 50%.
I couldnât work out from your commits what the options were. But guessing, Iâd put something like:
maintenance_check:
shortdes: âPermission for database maintenanceâ
longdesc: âis permission required to launch database management?. âDonât askâ options will run without askingâ
maintenance_freepage_ratio:
shortdesc: âFragmentation beyond this triggers automatic maintenance, or requestâ
longdesc: âFragmentation above the selected ratio suggests database maintenance. In this case permission will be asked, or carried out automatically according to choice for maintenance_checkâ
English is my first language, but that might not be an advantage for international understandingâŠ
click âyesâ and poof, itâs done. Theoretical limit is your disk write speed so with 30MB of freepages and default settings Iâd believe your db pre-maintenance was ~110MB, so the time to do maintenance would be âas long as it takes to write 80MB to diskâ. In most cases itâs neglible. Would you like any kind of confirmation that itâs done? or would you rather have it by default asking at the start of darktable (so it finishes before you start working)?
and the process shouldnât take more than ~2s in bad cases 
