Morphic performance

Adam Spitz adspitz at yahoo.ca
Sat Dec 13 21:17:44 UTC 2003


Morphic gurus,

I've got a performance problem.

I've put a package named Poses up on SqueakMap. It doesn't really do
much yet, but the idea is that I want to have a lot of morphs sliding
around on the screen at once. So you might say, "Remember the current
arrangement of morphs on the screen," and later on you'll be able to ask
Squeak to recreate that arrangement for you, and the morphs will just
sorta slide into place.

Problem is, Morphic doesn't seem to like moving lots of stuff around at
once. If you install Poses, you can go to the "open" menu and choose
"performance problem", which will recreate a simple pose involving about
six inspectors. (Make sure there's nothing on your screen that you want
to keep, though. :) On my machine, which is reasonably fast (1.33 GHz),
it takes about five seconds for the inspectors to reach their final
positions and sizes, even if there's nothing else on the screen at the
time. (I was trying to move through 16 "frames" at 50 ms each, so that
the sliding would take about 800 ms to complete. Is that hopelessly
unrealistic?)

I know I could just be sliding thumbnails around, or even abandon the
sliding idea altogether, but it'd be really cool if we could make it
fast enough to be usable.

So I'm hoping that somebody will be able to help me. Hopefully I'm just
doing something really stupid. (If you want to see the sliding code,
take a look at the *poses category in the Morph class.)


Adam



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