Morphic slowness (was Re: Does *anyone* use MVC?)

Tim Rowledge tim at sumeru.stanford.edu
Thu Aug 1 21:09:07 UTC 2002


In message <a05100307b96e66509feb@[10.0.0.2]>
          Bruce Cohen <brucecohen at qwest.net> wrote:

> At 3:16 PM -0700 7/31/02, Tim Rowledge wrote:
> >b) that morphic is close to unusable on my pBook 400 OS-X machine and on
> >my linux machine (p3/800 or something) these days.
> 
> Hmm ... I'm using 3.2 gamma with all updates on a 400 meg PowerBook 
> OS X right now and doing almost nothing  *but* Morphic programming. 
> Its' not super-speedy, but performance is OK except when I try to run 
> too many things at once (like putting "self halt" in a  method that 
> gets called every 20 milliseconds from a separate thread; very droll 
> :-(.   The one place where I would like more performance is when 
> trying to playback a previously recorded event stream; sometimes the 
> playback just can't keep up if there's something else going on.  But 
> that's also somewhat of an edge case.  What performance problems are 
> you seeing?
General tardiness in a non-descript way. I suspect that it's not so much
Morphic qua Morphic, but inadequately optimised applications of it. For
example, opening a menu in many browser places is taking maybe a quarter
second, which might sound good but is actually almost perfectly
irritating. Anything over 0.1 sec for something like that is just plain
bad. On my Acorn machine for example, native menus typically appear
about synchronously with the mouse button click reaching ones ear.
Really! Remember, this is a _slow_ machine as well.

I suppose we really need some good meaningful test scenarios that can be
automated and profiled to really try to sort this out. Then we could
find out where the time is really going and do something about it. It
wouldn't shock me to find out that somethings are being done two
or more times instead of once, for example. Some sensible caching might
prove useful.

tim
-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Machine independent code isn't.




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