Putting Banshee to Work

Recently I have spent some time creating a smart job scheduler for Banshee. Some jobs we have include

• Importing
• Saving metadata to file
• BPM analysis

BPM analysis and saving metadata to file jobs should be paused while doing speed sensitive jobs like importing. To achieve this, each job has priority hints and a list of resources it heavily uses. The priority hints are

• SpeedSensitive, for jobs the user is actively waiting on, such as importing
• LongRunning, for things like BPM or Mirage analysis of the entire library

And the resources are customizable, but currently I'm using

• CPU
• Disk
• Database

If two jobs use the same resource

• SpeedSensitive jobs run immediately (more than one ok)
• Normal jobs (not SpeedSensitive or LongRunning) then follow, one at a time
• LongRunning jobs then follow, one at a time

It is a bit of pretty low-level polish and a pretty simple idea, but it will give better performance and a better experience. The code is in a git branch for the moment, hopefully to be merged into trunk before 1.6.