B4J Question How to solve IDE keyboard lag?

[Mashiane]

Ola

My class has just run to 2900 code lines, so as it, the IDE has become rather slow tremendously as I have to wait a millisecond for it to show the last key i typed.

How can I help myself through this?

Thanks.

 

[Erel]

Are there any errors in the code?

Are you working in a very large sub?

 

[Mashiane]

Are there any errors in the code?

Nope, just the normal warnings #9, #12, #14 etc

Are you working in a very large sub?

I dont think so, whats the longest accepable sub lines? The longest sub is class_globals at 305 lines, otherwise everything else on average is about+-30 lines.

 

[MicroDrie]

Add some log the current time to see take most of the time via the log intervals.
Perhaps running against the string garbage routine?
repeated conversions in loops?

 

[Mashiane]

Add some log the current time to see take most of the time via the log intervals.

I don't think I have a clue about how to do that... i'm still coding in the IDE when this happens and its not a running app yet.

 

[cklester]

Doesn't the IDE have a profiler--functionality that lets you see how much time is being used by each line of code?

I also use a language called Euphoria, and here are the docs on the profile functionality. It's pretty useful at times.

And, I quote:

6.2.4 Profiling
If you specify a with profile or with profile_time (Windows only) directive, then a special listing of your program, called a profile, will be produced by the interpreter when your program finishes execution. This listing is written to the file ex.pro in the current directory.

There are two types of profiling available: execution-count profiling, and time profiling. You get execution-count profiling when you specify with profile. You get time profiling when you specify with profile_time. You can not mix the two types of profiling in a single run of your program. You need to make two separate runs.

We ran the sieve8k.ex benchmark program in demo\bench under both types of profiling. The results are in sieve8k.pro (execution-count profiling) and sieve8k.pro2 (time profiling).

Execution-count profiling shows precisely how many times each statement in your program was executed. If the statement was never executed the count field will be blank.

Time profiling shows an estimate of the total time spent executing each statement. This estimate is expressed as a percentage of the time spent profiling your program. If a statement was never sampled, the percentage field will be blank. If you see 0.00 it means the statement was sampled, but not enough to get a score of 0.01.

Only statements compiled with profile or with profile_time are shown in the listing. Normally you will specify either with profile or with profile_time at the top of your main .ex* file, so you can get a complete listing. View this file with the Euphoria editor to see a color display.

Profiling can help you in many ways:

• It lets you see which statements are heavily executed, as a clue to speeding up your program
• It lets you verify that your program is actually working the way you intended
• It can provide you with statistics about the input data
• It lets you see which sections of code were never tested -- don't let your users be the first!

Sometimes you will want to focus on a particular action performed by your program. For example, in the Language War game, we found that the game in general was fast enough, but when a planet exploded, shooting 2500 pixels off in all directions, the game slowed down. We wanted to speed up the explosion routine. We did not care about the rest of the code. The solution was to call profile(0) at the beginning of Language War, just after with profile_time, to turn off profiling, and then to call profile(1) at the beginning of the explosion routine and profile(0) at the end of the routine. In this way we could run the game, creating numerous explosions, and logging a lot of samples, just for the explosion effect. If samples were charged against other lower-level routines, we knew that those samples occurred during an explosion. If we had simply profiled the whole program, the picture would not have been clear, as the lower-level routines would also have been used for moving ships, drawing phasors etc. profile() can help in the same way when you do execution-count profiling.

 

[Mashiane]

Doesn't the IDE have a profiler--functionality that lets you see how much time is being used by each line of code?

Not that I know of.

 

[MegatenFreak]

One of my programs is huge. It has 80+ code/class modules and a total of at least 50,000 lines of code.
But I don't have a keyboard lag problem.
Does it happen right from the start? If it only happens after a while, check your RAM consumption via task manager. My PC has a problem that causes memory leak/build-up after sometime, and only after that happens an occasional typing lag occurs, which is fixed by closing and opening B4J again. it doesn't happen often though.

 

[Sandman]

Any noticable lag in any other apps at the same time?

When B4J is laggy, does it improve if you create a brand new project (not restarting B4J) and type in it?

Does it improve if you quit B4J and then open it, and your project, again?

 

[Mashiane]

My PC has a problem that causes memory leak/build-up after sometime, and only after that happens an occasional typing lag occurs, which is fixed by closing and opening B4J again. it doesn't happen often though.

That's what also I am thinking it could be. My laptop is running b4j in development mode almost 80% of the time, besides emails and the occasional googling. This happens after hours and hours of coding non stop. Usually when I start working on it for the first time, performance is good, then it starts performing.

Any noticable lag in any other apps at the same time?

Not that I have noticed of.

When B4J is laggy, does it improve if you create a brand new project (not restarting B4J) and type in it?

Have not tried that.

Does it improve if you quit B4J and then open it, and your project, again?

Yes, this I have done and it has sometimes worked and sometimes not.

I'm going to run CCleaner just to ensure that nothing is clogging the windows pipeline and will observe.

Thanks

 

[Sandman]

I'm going to run CCleaner

You should know that CCleaner has lost a lot of its good status as malware was found in it a while back. I don't know the current status, but I would be hesitant to install anything from that company.

• https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2017/09/avast-distributes-malware.html
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCleaner#Malware_infection

 

[Erel]

There are some settings that can improve performance: https://www.b4x.com/android/forum/threads/ide-slow-typing-responsiveness.72330/#post-460017

Make sure to close the IDE before changing the INI file.

 

[Mashiane]

Update: I have just noted something,..

It seems this happens for me, when I open another instance of the B4J IDE because I noted that as soon as I closed it, the keyboard didn't lag anymore.

I had opened a library project which I am referencing on the working project I was working on.