Application icons take a long time to load on slow network

[Alan Pope 🍺🐧🐱 🦄]

I'm at an event where the wifi has a captive portal (hhonors) and a company wireless network (Canonical)
I connected to hhonors first when I arrived and so it often gets chosen when I boot my phone.

When I boot up or unlock the device I see no icons in the dash for many seconds.
I have to either wait a long while (a minute) or switch to a wireless network which doesn't have a captive portal.

I don't believe we should be dependent on a network connection to just show locally installed application icons.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

Completely agree, can you tell though whether you get all the apps, but no icons, vs. the page just being blank?

[Alan Pope 🍺🐧🐱 🦄 (popey)]

I see all the text under where the icons should be, but with no icons. The page isn't blank, it's just missing icons.

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

This sounds like the network caching kicks in for local images or something... :/

[Albert Astals Cid (aacid)]

My guess for this is this:
 * There is one thread in Qt doing asynchronous loading for file, http and custom-provider images
 * The images on the dash are asynchronous
 * The Qt thread doing asynchronous loading pauses processing requests if there's 8 http requests going on
 * If the internet is slooooow it may happen that there is 8 http requests going on and thus the file local ones are stalled until one of the http ones finishes

Qt 5.6 will have a fix for this (and so will be if we backport the QQuickAsyncImageProvider patch as planned https://codereview.qt-project.org/#/c/108540/ )

I can also provide small patches against Qt 5.3 and Qt 5.4 if we want to carry those.

[Albert Astals Cid (aacid)]

So we basically have to either get https://codereview.qt-project.org/#/c/108540/ or it's smaller brother https://codereview.qt-project.org/#/c/109756/ in

[Timo Jyrinki (timo-jyrinki)]

Work ongoing now.