Xojo Perf Varies Greatly by Distro

As with many of you, I had poor performance running the Xojo IDE on Ubuntu Unity. After speaking with Paul Lefebvre at XDC where he was singing the praises of the performance of Xojo on Linux Mint, I decided to test a couple of distros to check their performance. Here are some of my findings:

Xojo on Linux

I hope this helps you be more productive as a Xojo developer. It certainly was eye opening for me.

Kevin, you defenitely should try Mint 16 64-bit. IMO SolydK looks realy ugly, sorry!

I’m always getting confused with Mint. It looks like a nice distro, but what version do I pick and why, is a mystery to me.
There’s Cinnamon, MATE, KDE and Xfce. All in 32 bit and 64 bit.
I see in you article you are staying with Ubuntu 64bit and developing in a 32 bit SolydK VM. Why do you not switch to Mint 64bit or SolydK 64 bit? Is there a reason?
How easy is it to install 32 bit libraries in 64 bit mint or 64 bit SolydK?
All these questions don’t have very clear answers for me.
Maybe people can comment with their opinions, so I can learn something.

I like Mint Xfce 32 so I’ll probably like Mint 64. Do you have the HTMLViewer working in Xojo? Did you have to do anything special to get it working, or did it work “right out of the box”.

I don’t mind you calling SolidK ugly. After dialing back the “eye candy” on Ubuntu to try to tweak out some extra performance, I am dazzled by the transparencies, glowing windows, etc. That may not last forever with me, but the big factor is getting the extra development performance.

It’s amazing the difference in performance between Ubuntu and Mint which are both based on Debian.

Right now, the official recommendation from Xojo is to run a 32bit distribution. While it is easy to get the 32bit libraries installed, from my understanding, the WebKit based HTMLViewer control doesn’t work with 64bit distributions.

You may want to look at my Xojo on Linux Part 1 posting. Hopefully it has some good information on why there are so many distributions.

I may take Mint 64 for a spin to see if Xojo and the HTMLViewer works and works as speedy as the 32bit version. I love the freedom to choose and try things out.

Is this the Mint you mean?

http://www.linuxmint.com

I have just tried the htmlviewer, but that doesn’t work, not the native not the webkit based. I have to investigate further. I hope i find a solution.

[quote=77784:@Kem Tekinay]Is this the Mint you mean?

http://www.linuxmint.com[/quote]

That’s the one.

As a Mac fan, you may also want to try Elementary OS. I did have to install the WebKit package to get the HTMLViewer to work with Elementary OS however. Simple and takes about a minute, but needed to be done.

Neat. But since I’ll only ever be remote debugging, I don’t really need the eye candy. Linux is evil, you know.

Besides, I go where @Paul Lefebvre goes. Just slower.

[quote=77790:@Kem Tekinay]Neat. But since I’ll only ever be remote debugging, I don’t really need the eye candy. Linux is evil, you know.
[/quote]

If you don’t need the eye candy, then the XFCE version is really light weight and performs well.

And um, I think your “evil dyslexia” is showing again! LOL.

If you find the solution, please let us know in the forum.

This brings up an important point. Had you tried Remote Debugger in any of these? You know, from a machine running a real OS?

(OK, OK, I just had to. :slight_smile: No flame wars please, I was just kidding.)

My question was serious though.

I haven’t done a lot of remote debugging except FROM Linux over to the Mac. Should work but I don’t have a lot of experience. I figure the only downfall might be the firewall software on Linux which might need to be turned off, or a port opened up. Doesn’t the remote debugger work over port 80 though? That should be open already. Perhaps someone else can chime in.

No flames from me. I know that you’ll be a devoted Linux fan by the time the next XDC rolls around. :smiley:

I fired up my Ubuntu installation in Parallels so I can check the right-click thing and also test HTMLViewer. Next I’ll install Mint and test Remote Debugger to and from. I’ll post my results here because all of this is better than what I had planned for the day (doing my taxes).

I’ve yet to run into trouble remote debugging into any version of Linux that I’ve tried. I just tried Mint and it worked just fine.

BTW, I’m using this version of Mint:

As with Kevin, I’ve also been testing some other distros of Linux with Xojo. Mint has been working quite well so far.

maybe as you guys (Paul, Kevin, Kem, etc) are doing the testing, maybe you can collect the results in one spot for the rest of us. me saying that in a “hopefully they will do that” tone.

I’m not doing much other testing. I installed Mint Xfce and it works fine. Both the IDE (including HTMLViewer) and Remote Debugger performed my simple tests without issue. Right-clicking is exactly as Kevin described. The bonus is a HD image about half the size of Ubuntu, so I’ll remove the Ubuntu installation to save that space.

The downside is that I have to manually update Parallels Tools within the VM, but that’s a minor inconvenience.

I’ve got that table in my listing that shows the Right+Click times, and whether the distro scales the desktop when the VM is resized. I’m not sure I want to take too much time to further performance test additional distros to be perfectly honest.

I was thinking about creating a benchmarking software in Xojo however. Something to benchmark SQLite DB operations, threading, graphics. Something that would help compare distros, as well as Mac and Windows performance. Is there anything out there like that in the community?

I’ve had no issues with Remote debugging on any Linux distro I’ve used. Mainly Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, 12.04 LTS (Hate the interface) and Linux Mint 16 64bit.

I have however hit an hurdle with mint 64 bit, I did install the 32 bit libs and all was well, however I have some open source radio automation software that I use, and it is 64bit. When I did a recompile of that, it got upset and needed the 32bit libs out of the way! Got stuck in a no-win.

HAve the conclusion that LInux’s workstation days are now too diverse, cluttered and ungeek-user friendly, however “Long Live the Server”

[quote=77803:@Paul Lefebvre]I’ve yet to run into trouble remote debugging into any version of Linux that I’ve tried. I just tried Mint and it worked just fine.

BTW, I’m using this version of Mint:

As with Kevin, I’ve also been testing some other distros of Linux with Xojo. Mint has been working quite well so far.[/quote]

I’ve had some trouble with Mint Cinnamon 16 x64, as can be seen from screenshots in my post here: Linux Min Xojo I am not sure what is causing the issue - aside from slow down when multiple projects are open and the weird screen pics in the other pst, it seems to work ok. Haven’t tried remote debugging.