Performance settings, Sequential and “random” browsing – FastRawViewer Software 2.0 (Download) User Manual
Page 83
FastRawViewer
– user manual
Page 83 of 175
Copyright © 2014-2016, LibRaw LLC,
Performance Settings
Depending on the characteristics of your computer, the most important ones being
Amount of RAM.
Number of processors and cores per processors.
Type and performance of the video card.
You may need to tune the performance settings of
FastRawViewer
to be more comfortable.
FastRawViewer
is optimized for work with files on modern high-speed storage devices: SSD drives,
disk arrays (RAIDs), fast flash cards (UHS-I and similar in fast USB3 readers).
When using slower media, additional optimization of
FastRawViewer
may be necessary, because the
default settings will not be optimal.
Sequential and “Random”
Browsing
While you are moving sequentially from one file to another (using Menu
–
File
–
Next File or by
selecting the next file through the Filmstrip or Grid),
FastRawViewer
is decoding the next file ahead,
so as to make the transition to the next file faster.
When you are browsing through the files in a “random” manner, that is selecting files which are two
files ahead or two files behind, the program can’t predict what will be the next file to process.
Because of this, it is recommended that one browse the shoot in a sequential manner, which is only
logical as in most cases, one wants to look through all of the shots that one made. As was already
mentioned for sequential browsing, decoding looks ahead, working in the background, making the
whole process smoother, without any delay for reading and decoding files.
Hard Disk Drives (HDD) and Hybrid drives (HDD with SSD cache)
Hard disk drives, cannot read the data from multiple locations at once: the delays are caused by the
time spent on the positioning of magnetic heads.
Accordingly, when using HDDs for optimal performance of
FastRawViewer
it is necessary to decrease
the amount of parallel reads:
1.
Preferences - Performance - Memory usage and performance - Number of simultaneous
RAW decode threads
recommended values for HDD: 2-3
2.
Preferences - Performance - Thumbnail cache - Thumbnail decoder thread count.
Set 1-3 for HDD (the higher, the more priority will be given to the preview generation over the
other functionality of
FastRawViewer
).
3.
Preferences - Performance - Thumbnail cache - Thumbnail prefetch depth
This parameter can be lowered (down to zero), which will lessen the load on the HDD.