Dash - Selecting any of the Search Filters in the App Lens should show all matching apps underneath the 'Apps available to download' category header, even if the user has not typed a search term

[John Lea]

Selecting any of the Search Filters in the App Lens should show all matching apps underneath the 'Apps available to download' category header, even if the user has not typed a search term.

Currently if the user has not typed any search term, only a few apps are shown in this category after the user selects one or more search filters and this is wrong. All apps in the software centre that match the selected filtering should be shown.

[David Barth (dbarth)]

This is fixed in the daily build i'm running, but I will let Mikkel or Neil confirm it's properly implemented the way it's defined here.

[Florian Boucault (fboucault)]

@David: what was the patch/bzr revision that fixed the issue? Is there any action to be taken in Unity 2D?

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen (kamstrup)]

We need some clarification on this: Does this also apply when the All filter is selected? That is - listing > 3k apps in a grid? Also I wouldn't be surprised if fx. Games or Accessories contains > 500 apps. Is the intention to just list them all?

[John Lea (johnlea)]

@kamstrup; ideally this would also apply when the All filter is selected, but I understand this might not be doable for performance reasons.

Also yes, the intention is to list all the available apps that match the selected filter(s).

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen (kamstrup)]

Ok. Let's try this early in the cycle and see what works.

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen (kamstrup)]

I pushed up lp:~kamstrup/unity-lens-applications/list-all-avail-apps with the requested feature. It does seem to cause quite some stuttering when searching. I'll try it on my el-cheapo netbook in a sec.

At this point I am not sure where or what causes the stuttering so it needs some profiling.

Oh! I also just remembered why we disabled back in ye olden days...It was because the intel i915 driver ran out of texture memory when showing > 1000 icons. Don't know if this is fixed (or even fixable?) :-/

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen (kamstrup)]

Just checked in Unity2d - it seems it must be doing some sync io or something because the whole screen locks up ~2s as it tries to render the thousands of icons.

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen (kamstrup)]

On my Eee 1001 netbook the prospects of getting this running at an acceptable rate are grim I am afraid... In Unity2d going from showing all available apps to showing all available games takes maybe 30s. It takes maybe 10s in Unity3d so also quite bad there...

(note: the actual searching, sorting, and listing takes ~1s for all apps, and ~50ms if it's just the games. the overhead lies somewhere in marshalling the result across dbus to unity and/or the rendering of the results (for u2d the vast portion is obviously the rendering))

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

Just to clarify: QML only renders what's currently on (or near on) screen, and you can see the result with the gwibber lens. Going from 3 to ~1k results takes a fraction of a second here. Loading the lens, on the other hand, takes some 3s, maybe.

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen (kamstrup)]

Ok, maybe "rendering" was technically the wrong word - but it appears that we have a ~20s overhead inside Qt somewhere then :-)

I think Kaleo talked about some unfortunate interactions between how DeeModels are updated with how Qt expects models to behave. Maybe that's it... I am certain he filed a bug against Dee back in the day, but I can't dig it out for the life of me!