What hardware?

[Uwe Haider]

Hi,

my Gentoo-Box is about 7 Years old - and so slow! Now I want new
hardware. The speed of digikam and lightzone is important fpr me. Also
the download of my pics from my Nikon/Olympus.

So, how can I optimize my hardware? A faster cpu? More RAM? Better GPU?
Which is the best way to speed up digikam?

--
Uwe Haider
[hidden email]

[Gilles Caulier-4]

CPU and RAM

digiKam is not optimized as well for GPU. Qt5 has options to use GPU optimizations but i'm not sure is all Linux packager use this options. At least, i'm sure because i do it myself, that digiKam universal AppImage bundle for Linux as no GPU optimisation at compile time.

Gilles Caulier

2016-11-19 22:23 GMT+01:00 Uwe Haider <[hidden email]>:

Hi,

my Gentoo-Box is about 7 Years old - and so slow! Now I want new
hardware. The speed of digikam and lightzone is important fpr me. Also
the download of my pics from my Nikon/Olympus.

So, how can I optimize my hardware? A faster cpu? More RAM? Better GPU?
Which is the best way to speed up digikam?

--
Uwe Haider
[hidden email]

[maderios]

On 11/19/2016 10:23 PM, Uwe Haider wrote:
> So, how can I optimize my hardware? A faster cpu? More RAM? Better GPU?
> Which is the best way to speed up digikam?
>
Hi
I know that hardrive slows down digikam db.
SSD is better.

--
Maderios

[Mikael Kujanpää]

maderios kirjoitti 20.11.2016 00:37:
> On 11/19/2016 10:23 PM, Uwe Haider wrote:
>> So, how can I optimize my hardware? A faster cpu? More RAM? Better
>> GPU?
>> Which is the best way to speed up digikam?
>>
> Hi
> I know that hardrive slows down digikam db.
> SSD is better.

I was about to say the same. The most important upgrade is from HDD to
SSD (I personally prefer Samsung ones), then cpu & RAM. As for gpu, the
one integrated to the cpu will do just fine for Digikam (of course you
might have other reasons to buy better gpu too). These upgrades will
improve the whole desktop user experience. On the other hand, if you
already have a SSD and decent cpu with memory more than 4 gb, you might
be disappointed with the results compared to the money you have spent.

Regarding the camera transfer speeds, if it supports the USB3, then make
sure your motherboard supports it as well and you have USB3 slots on
your case.

Mikki

[Peter Mc Donough]

Am 19.11.2016 um 22:23 schrieb Uwe Haider:
> Hi,
>
> my Gentoo-Box is about 7 Years old - and so slow! Now I want new
> hardware. The speed of digikam and lightzone is important fpr me. Also
> the download of my pics from my Nikon/Olympus.
>
> So, how can I optimize my hardware? A faster cpu? More RAM? Better GPU?
> Which is the best way to speed up digikam?
>

Download speed is dependent on your connection to the computer and
basically irrelevant if you compare the time for "beautifying" one
picture to to download time of a full storage card.
I bought a usb3 compatible card reader and use it on a usb3 connector,
the limiting factor is the storage card "read" speed.

Digikam can profit from CPU-cores. You graphics card should use openCL
which accellerates processing, and you computer shoud be fine with 16GB
of RAM, and most importantly an SSD where you should locate the digikam
database and the pictures you currently work on.

If you have as many pictures as I have you will forget the idea of
buying a big and therefore relatively expensive SSD just for photos
which need that speed only when processed. In other words, you will
still need an HDD.

cu
Peter

[Gilles Caulier-4]

About SSD topic, i would clarify one point : 

- Hosting database on SSD is a very good idea. This will speed up database registration and queries.

- Hosting collection on SSD is not mandatory, but's it will improve time access to image of course.

Gilles Caulier

2016-11-20 12:57 GMT+01:00 Peter Mc Donough <[hidden email]>:

Am 19.11.2016 um 22:23 schrieb Uwe Haider:

Hi,

my Gentoo-Box is about 7 Years old - and so slow! Now I want new
hardware. The speed of digikam and lightzone is important fpr me. Also
the download of my pics from my Nikon/Olympus.

So, how can I optimize my hardware? A faster cpu? More RAM? Better GPU?
Which is the best way to speed up digikam?

Download speed is dependent on your connection to the computer and basically irrelevant if you compare the time for "beautifying" one picture to to download time of a full storage card.
I bought a usb3 compatible card reader and use it on a usb3 connector, the limiting factor is the storage card "read" speed.

Digikam can profit from CPU-cores. You graphics card should use openCL which accellerates processing, and you computer shoud be fine with 16GB of RAM, and most importantly an SSD where you should locate the digikam database and the pictures you currently work on.

If you have as many pictures as I have you will forget the idea of buying a big and therefore relatively expensive SSD just for photos which need that speed only when processed. In other words, you will still need an HDD.

cu
Peter

[christian graesser]

Hi,
There is no need of a high end machine for Digikam. I use a medium quality laptop with intel core i5 8Gb Ram and 500 Gb Harddisk on Kubuntu 16.10. Digikam is really quick, when browsing the images, importing or doing image enhancements. My about 100 k images (16 Mpix)  i have 80k on an external usb3 harddisk and the recent 20k and the database on internal harddisk.

Best regards
Christian

On 19 Nov 2016 10:24 p.m., "Uwe Haider" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi,

my Gentoo-Box is about 7 Years old - and so slow! Now I want new
hardware. The speed of digikam and lightzone is important fpr me. Also
the download of my pics from my Nikon/Olympus.

So, how can I optimize my hardware? A faster cpu? More RAM? Better GPU?
Which is the best way to speed up digikam?

--
Uwe Haider
[hidden email]

[Boudewijn]

On Saturday, November 19, 2016 11:37:29 PM CET maderios wrote:

> On 11/19/2016 10:23 PM, Uwe Haider wrote:

> > So, how can I optimize my hardware? A faster cpu? More RAM? Better GPU?

> > Which is the best way to speed up digikam?

>

> Hi

> I know that hardrive slows down digikam db.

> SSD is better.

 

I second (third? xth?) SSD.

 

I run DK on my main PC that doubles as NAS with spinning drives in RAID5. It's on DK4 for less than a year. My laptop (an oldish X201) has access to DK5.2 via repositories, so I took the plunge and started using DK5 with the collections mounted over SSHFS and the database local on SSD. It took about a day to read all pictures and import them to the database.

 

When 5.3 came available as appimage, I tried it on my PC. I imagined importing would take just a couple of hours, as there would be no network and SSH overhead. Wrong! It took 2 or 3 days, and I blame my setup with database on spinning disks for it.

 

(My first upgrade will be an SSD ;-) After the initial load it is very workable though, even with spinning disks. I am very happy with postponed writing of metadata to files (and many other things :-) )!)

 

Have fun selecting components, and best regards,

 

Boudewijn