JAlbum vs. The Powermac and The Money-Go-Round

So last night, I upgraded to JAlbum 6.1. This version is touted as being multi-processor aware, and a little smoother to work with.

It was, and it was.

I set up a job to run through about 11,000 photos in the 2005 archive, creating new pages, thumbnails…. everything. You could watch the counter drive onward an upward at a much improved pace over the iMac. On the iMac, it was about five seconds per image. On the PowerMac, it was about 2-3 seconds per image, and this was happening on multiple processors — I think as many as three of the four. Astonishing performance.

Unfortunately, there are still some glitches with JAlbum 6.1. I still encountered two java out of memory errors along the way. I just restarted the album build, and it took right off, so no issues there. I’ve been reading about some ways around that though — one is to invoke from a script that uses the java command line memory allocation parm (JAlbum by default will use no more that 256Mb), and the other is to change an XML properties file somewhere inside the app. That’d be the best answer, but I don’t yet know how to do it.

Anyway, the new machine and new code rocks, and I think I’m back to getting good albums posted!

(BTW, as a note, there are occassions where the image can’t be displayed when the thumbnail is clicked on. I know why, and just have to fix the code. Patience! 🙂 )