Hi gang, long time user (off and on) going back to RB5.0. I’ve been delving into python the past few years and was intrigued by the new Web2.0 so I downloaded the latest version today. So many great features!
However, I’m finding the IDE navigator to be painfully slow. When I click on an item I can count, one one thousand, two one thousa…. before it is selected (just under two seconds from my estimate). I can’t imagine most people are experiencing that since it makes the IDE frustrating to use so I’m wondering what tips and tricks folks have to speed it up?
For reference, I’m just using the sample application Eddies Electronics (I used my own but for the purposes of seeing if it’s due to my project I tried EE and sure enough still slow). Also, my system is older but it’s been upgraded. Here are the specs:
Thanks Norman! That did improve the speed by at least a half second or more. I’m still right at about a second before it responds. Is that normal now? Any other tips?
Dunno
Just suggesting the things I know made a difference for me when I worked on the IDE and on at least 2 other projects of similar size
Additionally both these other projects have a decent sized set of plugins - but that only really affects load time
Other than that for small projects the navigator works fine
But it gets progressively worse with the larger projects
And tons of expanded rows
The more content it has to show and manipulate the worse it gets
My previous experience with xojo is similar to what Norman describes. It wasn’t ever snappy, but wasn’t slow until the project became very big. That’s what it acts like now with a project the size of Eddies Electronics.
The change from dark mode helps and gets the speed from intolerably slow to mere annoyingly slow. I was really hoping there was another tweak I could try.
And i highly appreciate it Norman. Thank you for trying to help.
It’s just that for some of us the IDE on macOS has become a nightmare to work with. And i assume most of us have tried everything (OS + IDE reinstall, no 3rd Party Plugins, no non-standard Theming, various Project Sizes, internal and external Screen, various Screen Resolutions and so on) and some of us only have 1 capable machine to develop with.
In my case, i have only 1 MacBook Pro Retina 2017 at home. So i had only the choice to go back to pre-2019 Xojo IDE’s or to stop using Xojo altogether. I choosed the latter because i have to use a more modern release for my daily job Project.
My Boss saw my struggle with the IDE on my MacBook and accepted the fact that i won’t develop at home anymore. We bought a strong Windows Machine and develop now only on Windows at my office. But we will switch to Rust (most probably) in 2021 or 2022.
Then he saw the handling of FR’s and finally deceided to no longer invest into Xojo.
Xojo repeatedly said that they have problems reproducing the issue. I have been using Xojo 2019r3 and 2020r1 successfully on my MacBook Air from 2017. Not really snappy but not slow. On the new Air 2020 Xojo is really nice. The only time I see Xojo getting slower is when I’m using a lot of memory (which usually is JWildfire for making fractals).
I’m really happy that you don’t have these problems.
But for those of us who have these problems, it doesn’t help. There are FR’s for these issues and I myself have offered every conceivable help (including 1.5 GB of trace, profiling, snapshot, … data). Unfortunately without any effect so far.
I get the impression that trying to reproduce the issue goes as far as testing on their computer. I would have expected them to have at least contacted customers for more information and maybe even connected to their computers. I’ve previously asked them how can I help to resolve these issues but I never got a response.
Maybe they should put more time into this rather than having hang outs at least once a week.
We do understand that some users are having speed issues in the IDE, and that they manifest differently on macOS, Windows and Linux. The improvements we have made so far have been tedious and time-consuming to fix. Some of the recent improvements (In 2020r1) have had the additional benefit of making it easier to profile the IDE itself. I am hopeful that this will help us isolate more of these cases.
Connecting to user computers to see this happening is actually less helpful than seeing a video of your screen. The reason is we can scrub through a video frame-by-frame and see what’s actually being drawn in many cases. Otherwise we would need to run the IDE source on your machine and that’s a non-starter. (Unless of course you want to send your machine to us )
We do have several large-ish projects that we use. The IDE obviously, but we also have Feedback and our internal order system. None of these projects exhibit the issues described in these cases under normal development.
Plugin function count is known to be a huge factor. While it is a selling point for some plugin makers, adding thousands and thousands of methods does contribute to this problem, especially typing speed in the code editor, but also some global lookup methods that have to traverse all of those additional classes when looking for superclasses, subclasses, interfaces, etc. (we don’t use 3rd party plugins internally because we can’t pass the licensing liabilities to our users, but we do use them for testing if a user project requires it).
As Norman stated above, the number of Tabs you have open is also a factor. I typically work with ~15, but in cases I’ve reviewed some users have numbers like 90. Whenever a change is made, each of those tabs has to be checked and kept in sync.
We do have machines of varying ages and configurations that we test with. In terms of macOS, I actually have 5 here at the moment:
Mac Mini 2010 - 10.11
Mac Mini 2011 -10.12
Mac Pro 2011 -10.13
MacBook Pro 2015 -10.14
MacBook Pro 2019 - 10.15
Things that seem to affect overall performance:
Drive Type: wherever possible, use an SSD drive. The boot drive on the three pre-2015 machines above were all upgraded for this reason.
Memory: The more the better, I find the IDE slows on machines that have less than 8GB total.
Graphics: macOS, Windows and Linux and their frameworks are getting more and more graphics rich all the time. Using a modern graphics processor helps a lot because the IDE is very graphics intensive itself.
FWIW, When buying new equipment, I tend to get the best video and RAM config I can afford because they affect my days the most.
I want to say one thing:
I have a MacBook Pro (SSD)
Where i almost never have slow downs. But when i have Skype, FaceTime or TeamViewer or any other video-based sharing software open the IDE gets almost to a stand-still. Compiling, moving, changing editor (method, property etc.) will become so slow it’s almost undo-able.
Closing these programs help alot. I asked @Geoff_Perlman at the time which mac he used, bought a comparable (as seen above) and this worked out to be a gold standard. Now it would be nice for xojo to find the cause and help improve all kinds of computers (or macs) getting the same results.
Your points are all valid but it doesn’t change the fact that the IDE is getting slower and slower. Here are the results of a typing test I performed a while back on the same computer using different versions of the IDE with the same plugins.
Xojo 2017r3 - less than 1 second (just about instant)
Xojo 2018r2 - 1 second
Xojo 2019r1.1 - 2 seconds
Xojo 2019r2 - 6 seconds
(I wouldn’t be surprised if Xojo 2014 was even faster)
I have provided stack traces and i’m sure other people have provided videos. Is is extremely frustrating that we provide this information and it just disappears into a big black hole.
If you cannot reproduce these problems and you don’t want to collect information from our computers (i’m sure there are other ways than having to run the IDE source on our computers) how do you suggest we move forward?
