Notices

Awesome. I figured it was something like that, and I've done some reading on the topic so I know what a nightmare RSS can be. (Go Atom!) In that case, I'm already enjoying using the app on a daily basis, and I can't wait to see what the future holds!

Thanks again!

Drew

Thanks for complaining about the feed cache update - I've had a look at the feed cache update code and traced its speed on my Desktop machine and found some very serious bottlenecks which I quickly fixed in my working copy. I then rolled another Maemo package (which is already available as 0.11.2-maemo3 in the repository - use program manager to update) and tested it with my small (5 podcasts) subscription list before and after:

gPodder 0.11.2-maemo2: 1:43,14
gPodder 0.11.2-maemo3: 0:08,18

That's about 8% the time that it took before If you're curious what I changed: The feed cache didn't handle etags and last-modified well, so it always updated and re-parsed the feed and also the saving of the feed cache happened after every download, so the entire feed cache was serialized after every podcast instead of once after the update.

Then, I also added some more optimization by only converting the feed to the internal structure if it has changed on the server (i.e. use the old, already-generated internal podcast representation if the new one would yield the same result). This should save some seconds, and we should be happier with gPodder's feed cache updates.

The updated package also includes another work-in-progress patch that tries to make the file names of the downloaded files more readable (tries to use URL-based basenames instead of md5 hashes of the whole URL).


Tell me what you think of it

Thanks thp!!! MUCH faster! Awesome work!
The only thing that would be icing on the cake is if it were possible to tap on the name of the show on the left and hit a button that said "Check for Update" so that it would only check that one feed for a new show. Other than that, gpodder rocks!

PS: Let me preface by saying that I'm no programmer, so go easy on me, but is there a reason why gpodder has to check for feed updates linearly back to back instead of checking the feeds all at once? I know the N800 can download multiple mp3 show files at once, why couldn't it do a parallel check of all the feeds at once, or if not, check like 5 at a time at the same time. Wouldn't this also cut down on feed update time? Just curious...

Hey! The newest version (maemo4) doesn't crash with keypad opening anymore. And it's LOTS faster too. Cool!! :-)

And a questions: what would correct settings be if I want gpodder to check and download new podcasts automatically (without any confirmation dialogs)?

Holy smokes! That's a huge improvement. Thanks!

Adammelancon, my understanding is that processing each feed is very resource intensive, and doing two in parallel would require twice the resources or twice the time, same as doing them serially. As we're limited by the resources of the tablet and the intensive code right now this wouldn't offer a speed increase. Instead, a way needs to be found to optimize the code to run faster or for anything unneeded to be removed, the latter of which was done today.

Thanks again for the performance boost thp!

Drew

I'm glad you like it

Are there any other N810 users out there that can confirm that gPodder doesn't crash with the latest version when opening the keypad? I didn't change that much, so I am a bit surprised that this bug went away, but if it doesn't come back, I'm more than happy that we don't have to debug this issue further =)

For the parallel feed cache update: Not at the moment, because of the way the code is structured, but theoretically it should be possible to do the downloads in parallel and parse them one after the other. Won't happen this weekend, and also not next week, I guess

I can confirm that the maemo4 version of gpodder fixes the crash when opening the keyboard on the n810. Thanks!

No luck for me, I get a segmentation fault when opening my keyboard. (As determined by executing gpodder --maemo --verbose via ssh)

The ESC key (n800) used to toggle between podcast subs and episodes.... has it been reassigned to 'exit' or am I crashing?

Sounds like crashing to me, I didn't reassign the key and I can't reproduce this problem on my N800. Can you please send me the contents of your /media/mmc2/gpodder/ folder, with the episodes removed to save space?