Graphics preview in parallel

[Neal Becker]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2026 at 9:53 AM Pavel Sanda <sanda at lyx.org> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> it's my long-term pain to wait for lyx loading the graphics when conversion
> chain is needed for the view. With longer reports with tons of images one
> has
> to wait while most of the cores are idling. Years back I created some patch
> to parallelize the preview chain, but it kept crashing for strange reason.
>
> I looked into the issue again now with claude and have decent version which
> does not crash anymore.
>
> 1. The attached code triggers in parallel min(4, #of threads on your
> machine)
>    conversion chains and thus process the conversions fater. I kept the
> cap on 4
>    so we don't overload the machine because of RAM.
>    Might slow initial load times on some machines.
>    I prefer it this way but I could see someone might not like it,
> objections?
>
>
> 2. I am introducing lfun which would trigger autoload of all previews. I
> found
>    myself regularly to scroll through the whole document, just that the
> load
>    process start and I dont have to wait later when working with the rest
> of
>    document. That's somewhat ridiculous. I do not propose to add this to UI
>    and keep it for power user who can bind it by shortcut.
>
>    Completely different approach would be just autoload everything on start
>    by default, but I don't like that option - the preview can take on
> longer
>    documents quite a while and slows down all editation.
>
>    It's in the second patch, and it does not interfere with the rest of the
>    codebase, so should be less controversial. Currently childern are
> included,
>    but I am thinking of striping that part.
>    Anyway are there some objections to include this lfun?
>
>
> Pavel
> --
>

Knowing nothing about the current graphic preview pipeline design, I wonder
if caching might be useful here?
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