Bad performance with inline gifs

With catimg, I often get gifs. The performance tends to be quite bad, especially on first load. I've noticed that if I force click the gif it loads just fine in the preview. I wonder if something can be done to make it more performant. Sometimes a moderately large gif can slow down the entire terminal, until I Ctrl-L.

Here's a movie demonstrating this (here the 123.3 MB uncompressed original if that helps): iterm2_gif_slowness_480p This is the gif in question: It's 7.4 MB.

You can't see it in the movie, but when I force clicked on the gif, it beachballed for a second. It also did so when I tried to close the preview. When I typed at the end, it was laggy. After I typed "catimg" I typed "Ctrl-U" to clear the line. It then beachballed, which is when I shook the mouse (it eventually cleared, as you can see). If you leave it running for long enough it runs fine (although still with some horizontal lines that break the frames).

I seem to remember gifs working much better back when I first wrote catimg.

This was with Build 3.0.20161002-nightly

It seems gitlab doesn't handle .mov movies so well. Here is the 8.1 MB 480p compressed video (in case you don't want to download the full 123 MB version).

This is possibly related to Sierra. I'm not seeing it so much on my older Mac on which I haven't upgraded yet.

I would guess that all of the ram on your machine got eaten.

I need to transcode these GIFs to movies, or else limit the number of frames that are respected.

Milestone changed to %Feature Complete 3.1

Does the quicklook preview convert to a movie first? I can check the RAM usage.

That uses the system quicklook viewer on the original GIF, so probably not, but it might be doing something more efficient than what we do, too, like decoding frames on the fly. Could do that too, but might as well go all in and use a saner compression format.

changed milestone to %Review for next version

mentioned in issue #5921