I wouldn’t be worried about an improvement 
But I know what you mean.
Like I said, may just be me. I was curious if a change was actually made or not. It is possible that any difference is a figment of my imagination, as I haven’t done any serious scrutinizing, let alone a blind ABX between results.
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Same with me, and I am not particularly ideologically inclined to only use FOSS software. I could be doing Lightroom or Capture one, but I find Rawtherapee to be more powerful.
Just installed 5.6. Fonts look good. For what its worth, as with 5.5 I had to manually edit my Win7 registry to get RT to show up as an option on the Win Explorer “open with” dialog. And like 5.5 it causes my system to hang for a few seconds when I close RT, and also has that separate DOS dialog window show up which I have to manually close. These are elements in my environment that were not present with RT 5.4
Maybe it’s this issue which especially shows up on windows:
- assume your number of cached thumbnails is (default) 20000 and you already have 20000 files in thumbnail cache folders.
- Now open a folder (let’s say with 200 files), which’s files have no thumbnail in cache
- At opening the folder the thumbs for the 200 files are generated and saved to thumbnail cache
- When closing RT, it counts the number of files in thumbnail cache (now 20200) and checks for the 200 oldest ones which have not been used. That’s a very expensive operation (at least on Windows) because it has to get the information of all 20200 files to find the 200 oldest, which then will be deleted.
To check if you ran into this issue:
- start rt
- close rt
- start rt
- close rt (should close fast now because the number of chached thumbnails didnt change)
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@JimPlaxco If the scenario I described is the one you ran into, I already have an idea to improve the behaviour 
Edit: The point is, if yoy use RT to open a single new file, while the thumb cache already has 20000 files, rt will need to check 20001 files in cache to remove the oldest one when closing rt.
By allowing the thumb-cache to exceed the defined size by for example 1% this could be reduced to a slow closing of rt only every 200 files.
Example:
- Cache has already 20000 files
- You open a new file which is not in thumb-cache by using
open with rt - The thumb will be added to thumb cache
- you close rt
- because the tumb cache size increased by less than 200 (1% of 20000) the cache will stay as it is
.
.
.
xxx) You open the 200th new file
xxx + 1) You close RT
xxx + 2) now the 200 oldest cached thumbs will be removed (which is still expensive, but will occur much less often)
I like the idea in general but I’m no fan of overcommitment. But 99% as a target size would solve that (subjective) concern.
But how about switching our cache eviction strategy from FIFO (20200 stat()s when evicting 200 entries) to random (0 stat()s) or 2-random (400 stat()s)? Shouldn’t hurt that much when opening a folder. Plus: there is a higher expectation that opening a folder takes time than that closing RT takes time.
Best,
Flössie
I’m curious to hear if anyone keeps anything close to 20,000 images in one folder?
This is about the RT thumbs cache, which resides in a single folder.
Oh, is it cumulative, cacheing thumbnails from different folders?
Exactly.
I know nothing about the subject but how about assigning an expiry date to cached thumbnails? Would an average user even want to access 20000 photos in a day?
Hi, thanks for this tip. In this case RT was opened in a subdir with only a few other files in it. Note that this is a behavior that only appeared with version 5.5 and is now continued with 5.6.
Timelapsers maybe. I recently made a time lapse with 4000 images. If it hadn’t started raining I’d have made it to 20000.
Of course I used camera jpegs, so no need to open big folders to process thousands of raws. If one were to have the resources to do a 20000 image timelapse, doing that in raw and with RT would be fun.
What’s the number of files in your RT-Cache data folder?
https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/File_Paths#Cache
It could easily happen if used for timelapses as u/hiram mentioned, as well as raw vido.
For this video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdg9xGB4hyY , I processed raw CDNG files produced by the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera in Rawtherapee. Athough the final render was only 4 minutes, 34 seconds, I ran about 44,000 raw files through Rawtherapee, including for frames of clips that got trimmed off in the timeline.
Edit: Syntax
After switching to RawTherapee version 5.6, I am having several severe problems:
- The file browser sees directories, but does not see files.
- When I double-click the directory name, no hidden directory in which the thumbnails of the images should be is created. Thumbnails are therefore not created either.
- I cannot change font size, or, more precisely, these changes are not saved in the configuration file. If the configuration file is edited by third-party editors, the changes do not affect RawTherapee.
Before the transition to the new version, everything was fine. The permissions for the directory containing the images are configured correctly.
I work with the OS OpenSuse Leap 42.3 KDE Plasma 5.8.7.
Yes of course. If I change this setting in RawTherapee, then the ~/.config/RawTherape/options file changes. But the situation does not change.
Hi, Sorry about the delayed response. I had 7K files in the cache. Unfortunately deleting them had no performance impact.