10.9. Increase the Image Cache

The Web sites explain that GIMP manages images in a slightly counterintuitive fashion. Instead of storing the image in a big array, GIMP instead breaks the image up into a series of tiles. These tiles are 64x64 wide. When a filter wants to access a particular pixel of the image, GIMP loads the appropriate tile, and then finds and returns the pixel value. Each call to retrieve a particular pixel can be slow. If this process is done repeatedly for each pixel, this can dramatically slow down performance as GIMP reloads the tile that it will use to retrieve the pixel values. Fortunately, GIMP provides a way to cache the old tile values and use the cache values rather than reload the tiles at each time. This should increase performance. The amount of cache that GIMP provides can be controlled by using the gimp_tile_cache_ntiles call. This call is currently used inside the lic and sets the cache to twice as many tiles as the image is wide.

Even though this might seem like enough cache, the GIMP might possibly still need more. The simple way to test this is to increase the cache to a very large value and see whether that improves performance. So, in this case, we increase the amount of cache to 10 times the amount that is normally used. After increasing this value and rerunning the filter, we receive a time of 2 minutes and 40 seconds. This is an increase of 6 seconds, but we have not reached our goal of 2 minutes and 30 seconds. This says that we must look in other areas to increase the performance.