For completeness and because I like taking screenshots, here is where to turn off transparency for Windows 10.
Settings > Personalizations > Colors
[quote=467534:@Troy Baxter]Hello,
I’m a pretty novice programmer but I’m having an issue with Xojo. As soon as I add more than a few objects into my program it becomes PAINFULLY slow. I mean it’s slow to move objects, slow to switch between layout and coding, slow to select new objects. Everything. When I run my program everything runs smoothly and quickly but it’s while I’m trying to program that it’s incredibly slow. I can’t imagine how this is normal. I can’t imagine anyone actually using this program to make a living. I would go nuts. Does anyone have any ideas what might be causing this? My Macbook Pro is early 2015, 8Gb of RAM. I’m running MacOS 10.14.6.[/quote]
I’ve seen slowness come and go in the IDE over the years. What I can tell you is that I’m using Xojo 2019r3 10-12 hours a day and I’m very comfortable with it. I didn’t get on so well with the r2 releases. What’s strange about that is that I’m not sure there was much in the r3 release notes that would have caused any speed up, but it’s tangible to me. So maybe it’s worth trying r3 if you haven’t already.
As Alberto and Sascha said, a video of what you’re experiencing might help to find a solution or at least get us all on the same page.
For reference, I’m usually working on a mid-2015 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM, on Catalina, and in Dark Mode.
@Greg O’Lone : you listed a couple of contributing factors. But then we should see a more linear problem. Why is your MacBook Pro fast while Sascha’s and Troy’s isn’t? Why don’t I see the problem on my MacBook Air?
Sorry. I don’t know how to do any of that.
[quote=467570:@Alberto DePoo]How many objects? What kind?
If you share a video others can compare and tell you if that is the way Xojo works or you may have another issue.[/quote]
30 or 40 perhaps. They’re just regular objects; text boxes, listboxes, group boxes, etc
[quote=467578:@Greg O’Lone]
What we do know:
- Apples insistence on drawing controls in recent years with translucency contributes greatly to this problem. Dark mode only exacerbates the problem.
- Having an SSD drive helps a lot. Make sure you have adequate free space available ( I like to have a minimum of 100GB free at any given time)
- Having more than just the Intel integrated graphics card is also important.
- If your machine has two video cards (integrated intel + Radeon xxx) see if turning off the automatic switching helps (in the energy settings).
Remember, the Xojo IDE gets its control drawings directly from the OS itself, so graphics performance is very important.[/quote]
I reduced the transparency and switched to light mode. There was a minor improvement but it was still bad. I just updated to r3 and once again no improvement.
I have Xojo projects that animate hundreds of objects (being dragged by the user) and it runs very fast… even at acceptable levels on an older 2010 MBP.
You aren’t connected to a remote server or cloud perhaps?
While for me Xojo is definitely not as snappy as it was awhile back, it has not been so slow as to be an issue on either my previous iMac:
Late 2013 27" 3.5GHz i7 (I7-4771), 32 GB, 512 GB SSD, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M with 4 GB
or my new for me (3 weeks ago) refurb iMac :
Early 2019 27" 3.6GHz i9 (I9-9900K), 40GB, 2TB SSD, Radeon Pro Vega 48 8 GB
(plan to use it for about the next 6 years before handing it down to someone else in the family)
Both are running Mojave… But as i don’t like all that transparency (had nothing to do with Xojo), I do have the reduce transparency option checked on both machines and I don’t use dark mode.
My new machine is pretty high speced both in CPU and graphics, so it could “hide” some performance issues, but i would have thought if it was a general issue I would have seen it on my old machine…
Whatever the cause it looks like the specifics are really hard to pin down!
- Karen
Good question Dave.
Having your Xojo project files in a iCloud, OneDrive, DropBox or Goofle Drive folder while editing in the IDE won’t help with speed issues. Doing this can also cause other problems.
@Troy Baxter: you don’t know how to make a video??? Do you know how to use Feedback?
As for the trace:
- Open Activity Viewer
- Wait until Xojo gets slow
- Select Xojo in Activity Viewer
- and select “analyse process” from the gear icon dropdown
- wait a bit, now save the result
Additionally, you can goggle how to use Instruments from XCode. It’s not too complicated.
I have noticed a general slowdown over time as Realbasic ballooned into RealStudio and then into Xojo. On the other hand computers have become more powerful.
The most responsive Mac OS I ever saw was System 7.x.x on a Macintosh SE, but I don’t want to go back to that. That was also the only Mac computer I saw with infected Windows generated file that was caught by an early antivirus program. I had the good luck of stopping a garage sale for a guy that worked for a Apple dealer back in the 1970s and 1980s in the state capitol. His basement was crammed full of shelving units with items he had saved from the dealership. Consider yourself lucky you are not working on a Macintosh Portable :0)
I tend to take good care on my Macs thus I still have a G4 350 MHz and a G4 dual 867 MHz running legacy equipment here. I have Realbasic & RealStudio installed on these and noticed various degrees of slowdown depending on what you are doing.
Although I have a newer Mac Pro I don’t attempt to do any serious work on it due to the limitations of laptops. They can only cram so much in the given space, which limits what you can do. My main workhorse is a Mac Pro Mid 2010 2.8MHz Quad-Core with a ATO Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB running a NEC PA241W and PA242W. It has four internal drives and additional backup drives via a external dock setup.
Drive 1 is for the OS and any applications only.
Drive 2 is another copy of the OS.
Drive 3 & 4 are for user generated content. Putting such content on the OS drive would gradually fill it up and slow it down. I like using WB Caviar Black 1TB drives.
I also do not store anything on the desktop other than a couple of Applescripts. A lot of items on the desktop can slow down the OS. You can test this by creating a app that uses a loop to write new files to your desktop. After awhile you will get a beachball for just nudging your mouse.
I don’t have any problems using Xojo while Photoshop, Illustrator and others apps are running.
No I don’t. As I mentioned I’m a pretty novice user.
Not that I’m aware of. All the files I use with my program (which are just .csv files) are located on my SSD. And to clarify, when the program is running, everything runs perfectly smoothly. It’s only while using the IDE that things are slow. And what I don’t understand is that I’m not making complicated programs. We’re talking highschool programming level stuff here. I’ve built a program that reads a .csv file and puts it into a listbox and then the user (myself as I’m the only user) can then edit that listbox and add, edit, or delete entries. That’s all the program does.
Also, earlier someone asked which plugins I was using and I said none. I was mistaken. I have the following plugins installed:
MySQLCommunityPlugin
ODBCPlugin
OraclePlugin
PostgreSQLPlugin
MSSQLServerPlugin
I don’t use these plugins and I have no idea what they are or what they do. (As I said, I’m a novice).
Thanks again to everyone trying to help!
not sure quite what your issue might be… my current project is now weighing in at about 35,000 lines, with dozens of windows, classes and modules
[quote=467604:@Dave S]I have Xojo projects that animate hundreds of objects (being dragged by the user) and it runs very fast… even at acceptable levels on an older 2010 MBP.
You aren’t connected to a remote server or cloud perhaps?[/quote]
The actual build applications are in no way slow, the IDE is slow.
But it wasn’t that slow before…
[quote=467621:@Derk Jochems]The actual build applications are in no way slow, the IDE is slow.
But it wasn’t that slow before…[/quote]
my point is the IDE for me has no issues with that size project
I see some major slowness in the latest releases…progressively worse after 2017.
Clicking from a folder to a window and back to the folder(after the window editor appears) in the IDE… the window has about 280 controls (labels, textfields, canvases on several pagepanels) takes about:
2017r3: 4 seconds
2018r4: 15 seconds
2019r1.1: 15 seconds
2019r2.1: 24 seconds
2019r3: 24 seconds
Try opening your project in 2017r3 and see if it’s more responsive.
I agree. I use 2017R3 for most of my work. It was the best and remains the best development IDE for me. Then, I open the app in 2018R4 to add dark mode capability. But when dark mode is not needed, I also compile in 2017R3 which has the best 64 bit speed, especially for math intensive calculations.
Xojoscript math performance was broken in 2018R2 and continues to be broken for any context based math operations. It is a known issue:
<https://xojo.com/issue/52780>
Another reason to stick with 2017R3 whenever possible.
Also, on MacOS TimeMachine can drag performance down in my experience and Console.app is a Xojo killer (no idea why but I’ve forgotten Console was open and Xojo crawls).
wow… I expericne NONE of that… guess I’m just lucky 
[quote=467578:@Greg O’Lone]
What we do know:
- Apples insistence on drawing controls in recent years with translucency contributes greatly to this problem. Dark mode only exacerbates the problem.
- Having an SSD drive helps a lot. Make sure you have adequate free space available ( I like to have a minimum of 100GB free at any given time)
- Having more than just the Intel integrated graphics card is also important.
- If your machine has two video cards (integrated intel + Radeon xxx) see if turning off the automatic switching helps (in the energy settings).
Remember, the Xojo IDE gets its control drawings directly from the OS itself, so graphics performance is very important.[/quote]
Greg, these are all good points but it doesnt explain why the performance of the Xojo IDE is getting worse with just about every release. No other application we use suffers from such a dramatic change in performance between versions. We are running macOS 10.11 so Dark Mode cannot be to blame.
2019r2 is now so slow that it is unusable. Because of this we decided not to renew our licenses. From the tests we performed (and reported in Feedback), the 2019r2 code editor was 3x slower than the 2019r1.1 editor which was also 3x slower than the 2017r3 code editor. I must admit I didnt spend enough time in other areas of the IDE to notice if they were also affected due to the API v2 omnishambles but I would be surprised if they werent also slower.
[quote=467633:@Dave S]wow… I expericne NONE of that… guess I’m just lucky 
[/quote]
It takes a while for Console.app to start affecting Xojo, but after 24 hours Xojo is completely unusable for me.
Fire the Disk Utils application and check your Hard Disk and Partitions.
Boot / Shutdown five or more times in a Row without launching any application and wait until the computer stabilize (stop doing things) before shut down, then press the Startup key (do not use Reboot button).
Try the safe boot two or three timesif the above is not enough.
When you fire Xojo, only load your project and do not save the test changes (or better, create a brand new one).
Use Save As with your Project, quit Xojo, Poser Off / Power On / Launch Xojo / Load the Save(d) As version.
Beside that