Is the IDE sluggish?

General
21

I don’t!

I love where this thread is going, yes, now I feel less alone too. My MBP isn’t so bad, right now I only have (as stand alone software) 2 chrome browsers, xojo, 2x Previews, 2x finder windows, desktop accounting package and 2 terminals. Oh, and pycharm, how could I forget thee! (minimised, seriously, that’s something I hate about OS X, opening minimised apps).

Of the two chrome browsers, one has 144 tabs, the other only has 76! (I did only reboot this last month!)

Daves-MBP:~/Manager$ uptime
11:49  up 38 days, 10:21, 2 users, load averages: 1.11 1.43 1.45

I do love the MBP keyboard shortcuts for navigating tabs, it’s almost second nature (CMD+OPT with the left thumb and <- or -> with the right fingers), and on linux I can move tabs as well (why can’t I do that on mac?)… And I was really hoping the new Chrome “Group” tabs feature was going to be better than it was, but, oh well… lol

But my main box, it has no less than 4x Chrome windows and a couple of firefox ones. No one window has less than 100 tabs… But I have some idea where something is, but every now and then when I can’t find something I’ll open a new window and start a new set of tabs. That’s when tab hell starts. lol…

If ever I want to see a performance boost, I just shutdown and restart chrome.

I use two tab managers in particular:

Between those two, when I need to shutdown chrome I backup all tabs to one of those first (I prefer Outliner because you can save whole windows, and re-open the whole window when you want to come back to a project, pretty cool).

22

It’s CMD SHIFT and the arrow keys here …

23

Do you know you can open more than once the same window ?
So, instead of getting tabs with 10 pixels wide… (or less), you will get, maybe, a part of the window name !

So, Is the IDE sluggish ?
Depends !

24

Hi All, I wanted to put on the record that I successfully got my Xojo editor window to speed up again after it dropped to a crawl.
I have seen years worth of posts about adding several controls and speed drops to ridiculous levels where I saw it take 5 seconds just to select a control in the design window.
So my remedy may be useful…
I was working on my second actual learning project, new to XOJO but not new to computing in general.
Working on the project on a Mac at work (sorry don’t have specs to hand) and transferred it to home PC Windows10, had about 18 labels and buttons in a window with 6 imagewells. All working perfectly.
Transferred it to my PC at home. Worked normally, although the appearance of some buttons changed. So I added a few more labels and the performance suddenly crashed! Just clicking on a label would whirr the HD and blink the “not reponding” icon for fully 5 seconds or so before letting me back in.
Absolutely annoying! So I did all the basic remedies to no avail. (restarting etc)
Then went to next level uninstalling unused apps via Windows10 settings/uninstall apps and removed about 10 apps such as Skype, VNC server, Couple of old camera drivers, Freebie slideshows, junk like that.Nvidia GForce experience, Logitech Gamepad driver, Msoft phone app, Msoft Money app. IP camera apps.
Sorry I didn’t make a proper list as I wasn’t expecting it to work.

After this, performance is back to normal! Hooray! Hopefully it will last…
If anyone wants me to reinstall a particular app as a suspect in causing a conflict, let me know.

2 Likes
25

I am glad this solution worked for you. However, if you need one of such applications like Skype, you are out of luck.

So for me, this is not a solution. The true solution would be if Xojo rewrites their IDE no longer in Xojo itself but use an industry-standard language like C, C#, …

In those RealStudio days, it was a marketing advantage promoting Xojo, nowadays, it shows the weakness of Xojo. I wish it was different but this is the reality.

2 Likes
26

I didn’t have to remove Skype, it was just one of the things I dont use.

1 Like
27

I don’t think so. think what is means to rewriting the whole ide …
but sure issues must be found and fixed.
maybe exactly on the pc that cause this trouble.
xojo team could have a look with remote desktop, vnc, team viewer etc.
the ide start could also check requirements and check if other app version or runtime cause conflicts and message it.

28

This peaked my interest, did you have a screenshot of this or a description of how they changed?

29

C is no guarantee for performant software. To make/keep software performant, you have to make sure that it does not slow down. This costs a lot of time. Also in C.

3 Likes
30

Not really, the IDE performance had a big improvemento from 2018 to 2019 on windows, this means that it is not the languaje itself but a poorly implementation that can be improved but that needs time resources and staff.

I have a i7-8700 3.7 Ghz, CORSAIR SSD M.2 and 64GB DDR4 RAM and I can tell you, IT IS THE IDE. I star to use UNITY last year, an IDE way way more complex than Xojo and it is really fast.

not you I remember feeling the VB6 IDE being snappier 20 years ago in my 533 mhz celeron

2 Likes
31

Overall 2020r2.1 is adequately fast on my fully-loaded 2018 MBP, except for one thing: the Variables popup menu and Watch Pane in the debugger “beachball” very frequently, for a second or two. I don’t recall previous versions doing this to a noticeable extent, but with 2020r2.1 it’s quite annoying.

33

Very interesting comments made in this thread.

I think the right question to answer (both for customers and the Xojo inc team is:
Why is the IDE sluggish at one person and why not with the other?
I am sure to find the answer is very difficult but once found, Xojo knows how to solve the problem.

Personally, I find the look and feel of the 2020 r1.2 IDE clear and well written. I can live with some delays in the IDE.

In my opinion, this thread is very important because discussing what’s goes wrong can be the key to solve the problem.

2 Likes
34

The variables viewer has always been flaky.
I try to avoid it as much as I can because more often than not, it just bombs out the app completely,

I suspect the IDE / editor is much slower than it needs to be simply by virtue of the autocomplete.
if there was an option to turn it off, and ‘call it up when you want it’, that might make a difference.
(and if there is such an option, lemme know… ;>. )

1 Like
35

I’ve been meaning to post on this too. Xojo has its moods: one day (same project, same # windows ie 2 with say 10-12 tabs each) the code editor is fine (tho controls are always sluggish to move around but this i can live with). The next day, for no apparent reason, the editor pokes along at 2 characters per second. Were it not for autocomplete, it would be close to unusable.
This is a very big issue IMHO because it really slows down one’s work.

1 Like
36

So for me, this is not a solution. The true solution would be if Xojo rewrites their IDE no longer in Xojo itself but use an industry-standard language like C, C#, …

The old Real Studio IDE was written in REALbasic (Xojo) and is quite snappy on the same hardware as the current Xojo IDE. In fact it’s snappy on much older hardware. The problem is not that the IDE is written in Xojo, the problem has to be with the newer IDE’s architecture.

I have no idea what it would take to make the current IDE faster, but I would love to see it happen.

37

Perhaps, but autocomplete worked great in the previous Real Studio IDE. Rather than turn it off it would be great to see it work quickly and efficiently as it is a valuable tool.

38

Cna you guys do some debug runs and see the memory usage of your app and the IDE after 15 mins running? Does it seem to be much much more than running a build of your app?

39

Screen Shot 2021-03-01 at 7.33.34 am
Screen Shot 2021-03-01 at 7.33.34 am3708×1210 205 KB

Exactly the same code, Mac on left PC right.
The bad news is that the design interface has gone slow again. So I will have a look at background and see what is causing this tonight…
Current versions of XOJO on both.

40

Don’t overlap controls. That causes speed/transparency issues.

41

Ah ok thanks, for some reason I read that you moved between two Windows machines and got different buttons, oops :slight_smile:

As for the slow down, and pausing when you click on labels, I’ve checked the IDE and I can’t see the file system being hit when you click between labels, the only thing that is hit, is the registry.

So my thought would be, do you have some form of backup software running on the machine like acronis, anti-virus or some other type of app that is being triggered by registry access?

Are you low on resources, drive space, I note that you are using a spinning disk, have you checked that for errors lately?

What graphics card do you have, have you installed the latest nvidia driver for it? You might want to reinstall geforce experience as it will let you know when you have new drivers to install as well as help you more easily install them.