[Cuis] New updates

[Phil (list)]

On Sat, 2015-06-27 at 21:08 -0300, Juan Vuletich wrote:
> Hi Phil, Peter,
> 
> (below)
> 
> On Sat, June 27, 2015 8:19 pm, Phil (list) wrote:
> > On Sat, 2015-06-27 at 10:32 -0300, Juan Vuletich wrote:
> >
> >> Hi Folks,
> >>
> >>
> >> Our new community member Peter van Rooijen (welcome Peter!) reported an
> >>  intolerable slowness in the Transcript on the Mac. It turned out to be
> >>
> >
> > Hi Peter!
> >
> >
> >> that direct Display access (without the double buffering Morphic uses)
> >> is extremely slower on a Mac than on Linux or Windows (about 1000 times
> >>  slower!). The fix was not trivial, but the results are good. What I
> >> did is to have the display update deferred all the time, not just during
> >>  Morphic update. This requires forking a new process that pushes
> >> Display
> >> to the actual screen if requested, but no more than 20 fps. It seems to
> >> work ok on all 3 major platforms, with elimination of flicker, modest
> >> speedup on Linux and Windows and very dramatic speedup on Mac.
> >>
> >
> > One minor display update difference I notice as a result of this change
> > is that when loading a large number of packages back-to-back, I used to see
> > progress popups sprayed to the screen (i.e. one per package) that
> > continued until all the packages were loaded.  Now I only see a few and
> > they really don't get updated giving the appearance of being frozen, but
> > the packages are still loading as they should.  It's not really an issue
> > in this case (i.e. either behavior is a bit janky but not annoying enough
> > to get me to do anything about right now) but something to keep an eye on
> > with long-running processes (spanning several seconds or more) in other
> > parts of the UI.
> 
> Please try changing the Delay in #screenUpdater from 50 to 20, and do
> 'DisplayScreen installScreenUpdater'. They try loading the packages. Does
> this improve it? Specially if it does not, but in any case, what OS and VM
> are you using?
> 

That resolves it initially (for about the first 5-10 seconds) but then
the updates stop showing again.  If I recall correctly, doesn't Morphic
back off on screen updates by default after a period without
keyboard/mouse activity?  The interplay of your latest changes and that
might be the issue.  I'm running on Linux with the Cog 15.14.3308 build.
I've tested the new build with some long-running animated morphs and
they seem to be fine so for this issue, I wouldn't worry about it too
much unless you're concerned that it's a symptom of a larger problem.

> Peter, does this higher frame rate (from 20fps to 50fps) make the
> Transcript much slower in your setup?
> 
> Thanks,
> Juan Vuletich
> 
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