[✓] Editor lags?

[GanonZD]

Unas, I was thinking, exactly how much of the CPU/memory/whatever is used on managing all the pop-up menus? Because I think we could easily do without some of them if that would save CPU. For instance, instead of opening the screen editor through a pop-up menu, why not just open it when the player clicks the screen previews, as has been previously suggested, and then remove the pop-up completely? We never really needed the options of that pop-up menu anyway, since any scene settings involving characters had to be managed from the screen editor anyway---and 99% of all scenes have characters.

[Unas]

Memory cost : ~. Nothing until the popup is generated, and since there is only one popup generated at a time it's really not much memory overall.
CPU cost : ~0 before popup is generated and once it's displayed.
Though, it's true that generating a popup each time you hover a cell has a small CPU cost. On slower machines these popups could take a short while to generate, as they contain big select lists with lots of previews. That might explain some of the lag you've been noticing.

Regarding the one for the screen cell, I originally planned to include more options in it (to select character and so on), but it's true that it's pretty much useless as of now. I could probably save the users a little bit of time (the time it takes to generate the popup, supposedly imperceptible for most people, but well) by getting rid of the popup and just making the cell clickable.
I'll think about it.

[GanonZD]

Hey, I'm just trying to come up with ideas for optimisation.

Also, I've noticed that often when I hover over or click on something, the small screen preview on the left flashes for a short moment. This could perhaps mean that the preview is reloading every time I do that? Dong this should not really be necessary unless I actually change something, and not even when I type something in the text field. So this could maybe also be eating some CPU?

[Unas]

Yes, the screen preview reloads whenever the frame row is refreshed, which happens whenever a minieditor (that's how I call the popups to edit the contents of a cell) or an editor panel (that's the screen and action editors) is closed.

This could certainly be improved.

[Enthalpy]

I'm having some issues with the v6 editor after the most recent update. The new system is nice in that ctrl-f works, but almost every time I save my ~1000 frame trial, I get load times of about 25 seconds, which is a bit irritating - occurring everytime I save. There's also lag in general - when I click on things, there's a 1/2 to 1 second hang up that can be pretty irritating, as others have stated before. I didn't get it prior to this update.

Just to be clear, is this 25 seconds for you to save and nothing else? It would also be nice if you told us how long saving the same trial would take under the old engine. You should be able to find the link to it in this post.

[drvonkitty]

Just to be clear, is this 25 seconds for you to save and nothing else? It would also be nice if you told us how long saving the same trial would take under the old engine. You should be able to find the link to it in this post.

I tested it with the old editor and got about the same amount of time for the loading, so it doesn't seem to be related to the newest update. Moreover, let me explain - the saving itself takes about 10~ seconds to be completed, and then there's another 15 seconds where it loads the trial, totaling 25 seconds from when I hit the save button to when the trial is back open again.

[Ferdielance]

I'll second any suggestions that replace hover + click with just a click. "Flattening out" an interface so that more options are available in fewer mouse moves/clicks will generally be something I like! While I understand the newbie-friendliness of hiding complexity behind multiple interactions, it's hard to work efficiently without hotkeys when you have to do mouse hovers or other slow actions to reveal the next move you want to make.

[GanonZD]

As mentioned in another topic, I have now tested the editor in Firefox, and everything ran extremely smoothly and without lag. So all of the issues I've mentioned are only related to Chrome. I'm sorry I didn't find out about that earlier, Unas.

[drvonkitty]

Just to be clear, is this 25 seconds for you to save and nothing else? It would also be nice if you told us how long saving the same trial would take under the old engine. You should be able to find the link to it in this post.

I tested it with the old editor and got about the same amount of time for the loading, so it doesn't seem to be related to the newest update. Moreover, let me explain - the saving itself takes about 10~ seconds to be completed, and then there's another 15 seconds where it loads the trial, totaling 25 seconds from when I hit the save button to when the trial is back open again.

To update, the memory usage on firefox for me when having JUST the editor open is now 1.7 GB and it's pretty much unusable
Luckily Chrome works fine and mercurialSK showed me a way to lower the memory usage when I have the time, although I'm not sure if it'll be enough. Anyway, chrome doesn't have nearly the same sort of saving and lag problem that firefox has. MercurialSK said something about how firefox stores images which might be why if that's any help to you. Anyway, that's just an update on my situation, hope it's helped somehow.

[Unas]

Thanks for the update. 1.7GB with just the editor is way too much indeed...
I've been working a bit on improving memory usage lately so hopefully I'll be able to deliver some improvements soon.

What is that "way to lower the memory usage" you speak of, though ? I need to know, in case it could inspire me on other ways to improve the editor.

[drvonkitty]

Thanks for the update. 1.7GB with just the editor is way too much indeed...
I've been working a bit on improving memory usage lately so hopefully I'll be able to deliver some improvements soon.

What is that "way to lower the memory usage" you speak of, though ? I need to know, in case it could inspire me on other ways to improve the editor.

MercurialSK (he's on AAO as well) is the one who told me how, so as soon as I get a chance I can ask him to post it here, he can explain way better than I can.

[mercurialSK]

What is that "way to lower the memory usage" you speak of, though ? I need to know, in case it could inspire me on other ways to improve the editor.

It's just going to about:memory and trying to free some of the dead memory from there, or using the RAMBack add-on if it's not sufficient enough. I don't think there's much that can be done since Firefox does have memory leak problems - I think 1.7GB was accumulated over several saves and extended usage, since it hasn't used 1.7GB for me before.

[drvonkitty]

I just did another test on the editor in Firefox and it's already crashed on start-up (all I did was go to the "music" panel), consuming a grand total of either 585 or 620 MB of memory (the processes manager and my anti-virus pop-up refused to agree) - it started at 200 MB and rapidly rose up to that total. The crash pertains of basically firefox freezing and locking-up, and I have the forcibly close it out - sometimes it comes back fromt he crash, but the second I click anywhere it goes back to being locked up.. So yeah, the 1.7GB was probably accumulated if I had to guess, but 1/2 a GB is still a pretty high number for just the editor.

I did a second test, restarting the editor and going into the storyboard, which got up to about 400 MB of memory usage and no crash. After that, I went into the music tab and it went up to 700 MB and crashed. It seems that the music tab is the biggest offender, but maybe just the memory accumulating as SK said? It started at 200 and went up too 400, and then jumped up 300MB when I entered the music tab. It also jumped up 300MB when I went directly into the music tab the first time. Anyway, I don't know much so I'm just guessing, you guys are the ones with the know-how after all

Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help out with finding the problem - it could just be my computer, although that's strange so I never had issues with V5 or V6 lagging before, and the new update ran alright for a few weeks until this whole ordeal.

[Enthalpy]

For reference, I can't reproduce drvonkitty's results on my laptop. Loading an ~3000 frame trial for me takes ~.29GB, and loading the music tab changed it less than .01 GB. I have a small suspicion that the problem here is the trial file, not the editor. I would be very interested to see if drvonkitty can reproduce this lag when viewing other trials of comparable size in the editor.

I'd also be willing to help run additional tests if that would help determine the problem. For instance, I have to wonder if maybe it's the trial file that's the problem, and not the editor?

[drvonkitty]

For reference, I can't reproduce drvonkitty's results on my laptop. Loading an ~3000 frame trial for me takes ~.29GB, and loading the music tab changed it less than .01 GB. I have a small suspicion that the problem here is the trial file, not the editor. I would be very interested to see if drvonkitty can reproduce this lag when viewing other trials of comparable size in the editor.

I'd also be willing to help run additional tests if that would help determine the problem. For instance, I have to wonder if maybe it's the trial file that's the problem, and not the editor?

If it's the trial file itself though, then that raises a problem considering it works perfectly fine for SK (on whatever browser he uses, I'm not sure) and perfectly fine on Chrome for me. It seems to only have those issues on firefox for me - but if you have a trial of similar size that I can get into the editor of on firefox, I can certainly give it a try and let you know the memory usage there. If there's anything you need to test, I can add you as a collaborator temporarily so you can get in and see what you need to see (as long as you don't mess with anything, of course )

Just let me know how I can help.