Question

I have a custom widget which displays many items in rows:

void update(){ //this is a SLOT which is connected to a button click
    QVBoxLayout *layout = this->layout();
    if (layout == NULL){
        layout = new QVBoxLayout;
        this->setLayout(layout);
    } else {
        QLayout_clear(layout); //this is a function that I wrote that deletes all of the items from a layout
    }
    ArrayList *results = generateData(); //this generates the data that I load from
    for (int i = 0; i < results->count; i++){
        layout->addWidget(new subWidget(results->array[i]));
    }
}

The problem is that there are about 900 items and a profile reveals that simply adding the child object to the layout takes 50% of the time (constructing takes the other 50%). Overall it takes about 3 seconds to load all of the items.

When I click on the button to load more data, the entire UI freezes for the 3 seconds and then all of the items appear together when everything is done. Is there a way to progressively load more items as they are being created?

Answer 1

The first trick is, as Pavel Zdenek said, to process only some of the results. You want to process as many together so that the overhead (of what we’re going to do in the next step) is low, but you don’t want to do anything that would make the system seem unresponsive. Based on extensive research, Jakob Nielsen says that “0.1 seconds is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously”, so as a rough estimate you should cut your work into roughly 0.05 second chunks (leaving another 0.05 seconds for the system to actually react to the user’s interactions).

The second trick is to use a QTimer with a timeout of 0. As the QTimer documentation says:

As a special case, a QTimer with a timeout of 0 will time out as soon
as all the events in the window system’s event queue have been
processed. This can be used to do heavy work while providing a snappy
user interface.

So that means that a timer with a timeout of 0 will be executed next, unless there is something else in the event queue (for instance, a mouse click). Here’s the code:

void update() {
    i = 0; // warning, this is causes a bug, see below
    updateChunk();
}

void updateChunk() {
    const int CHUNK_THRESHOLD = /* the number of things you can do before the user notices that you're doing something */;
    for (; i < results->count() && i < CHUNK_THRESHOLD; i++) {
         // add widget
    }
    // If there's more work to do, put it in the event queue.
    if (i < results->count()) {
        // This isn't true recursion, because this method will return before
        // it is called again.
        QTimer::singleShot(0, this, SLOT(updateChunk()));
    }
}

Finally, test this a little bit because there’s a gotcha: now the user can interact with the system in the “middle” of your loop. For instance, the user can click the update button while you’re still processing results (which in the above example means that you would reset the index to 0 and reprocess the first elements of the array). So a more robust solution would be to use a list instead of an array and pop each element off the front of the list as you process it. Then whatever adds results would just append to the list.