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 Typing is (still) crazy slow

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T O P I C    R E V I E W
kimbo Posted - Sep 13 2011 : 05:22:36 AM
Hi everyone,

I'm using VAX 10.5.1738 with VS2008 on Win7x64 and I have the problem that VAX slows down the typing when I'm within a function header which has lots of different signatures (the Qt ctors of QString and QVariant are good worst case scenarios for that).

I tried out the 10.6 but I had the same performance meltdown. Can I do anything about it? It's really annoying. I created a shortcut to enable/disable VAX for that ;)

I think it's a design fault that VS allows plugins to block the user input from the background - in my option a fluid non-delayed typing is a crucial feature of an editor.

So it would be awesome if VAX could work in the background without blocking the input.

greets
kimbo
18   L A T E S T    R E P L I E S    (Newest First)
support Posted - Oct 04 2011 : 11:14:13 PM
case=61442 is fixed in build 1859
feline Posted - Sep 23 2011 : 3:42:39 PM
I have replied via email. Unfortunately no, so far I have not been able to reproduce this effect here.
kimbo Posted - Sep 23 2011 : 12:57:55 PM
The special version doesn't have any effect. Can you reproduce it on your system?
kimbo Posted - Sep 22 2011 : 2:36:39 PM
Holy ****, it's like day and night :)
Where is the difference? Do I have to press Ctrl+Space to get the suggestions drop down list now? I think I can live with that.

Btw, we tested the latest VAX with VS2010 today and it had the same problem.
feline Posted - Sep 22 2011 : 11:15:23 AM
At least this is not a machine specific problem, that is sort of good news. Can you try turning off:

VA Options -> Advanced -> Suggestions -> Include suggestions in listboxes

for now, and see if this makes any difference? If this helps then we may have found the problem and have a possible fix.
kimbo Posted - Sep 22 2011 : 04:56:41 AM
That's crazy, everyone in my company can reproduce this lag.

The only plugin I've installed is RockScroll [1] but it doesn't influence the speed.

You can find the settings at the dump location, filename is "settings.7z".

[1] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IntroducingRockScroll.aspx
feline Posted - Sep 21 2011 : 2:02:53 PM
I have the log and mini dump, thank you for these, hopefully they will offer some clues:

case=61442

Do you have any other plugins or IDE extensions installed? Any other software that might be effecting screen updates and the IDE?

Can you please export your VA and IDE settings and send them to me:

VA Options -> Performance -> Export Settings
IDE tools menu -> Import and Export Settings -> Export selected environment settings

I can then import them here and see if I can reproduce the problem. I don't see how your settings could be causing this, but it is worth checking all the same.
feline Posted - Sep 19 2011 : 5:27:58 PM
There have been various changes to VA since build 1738 to make typing faster, so the fact the latest build is slower is definitely a bad sign.

VA makes heavy use of threads, but it also has to get quite involved with the IDE and typing in order to do what it does, which complicates things.

Can you please grab a mini dump of VS2008, with VA 1856, while this problem is happening. Using the following command with procmon should produce a suitable mini dump:

procdump.exe -c 50 -u -s 2 devenv.exe vs2008_load_sol.dmp

As explained in this FAQ entry:

http://docs.wholetomato.com?W303

this will grab a dump of Visual Studio 2008 when the process CPU usage hits 50% relative to a single core for 2 seconds, and save out the dump file called "vs2008_load_sol.dmp*" in the current directory.

Can you also please turn on VA logging before starting this test, and turn off VA logging again after the mini dump has been saved out. This way we will have matching logging and a mini dump, which will hopefully help to explain what is going wrong here.

Please see this FAQ for details of turning on VA's logging, and sending us the log files

http://docs.wholetomato.com?W305
kimbo Posted - Sep 18 2011 : 8:14:54 PM
With the 1856 it's much slower (up to 5 seconds). I could reproduce a situation where I switched with Alt+Tab from the Task-Manager to VS and got a peak of 15 seconds and the VS window title bar was flickering some times (looked like it was requesting the focus 3-4 times). A really strange behavior. I can record a video if it sounds too unbelievable :)

What I don't understand is why VAX can't do its work in another thread and let my type in without blocking the input.
feline Posted - Sep 16 2011 : 12:00:48 PM
Apologies for that, I did not realise you had so many cores. No, with that many cores the IDE maxing out a single core is not going to show. 12% shows that the IDE is using 100% of one core, so the problem is definitely showing up here.

Can you try installing VA 1856 and see if this makes any difference:

http://www.wholetomato.com/downloads/default.asp
kimbo Posted - Sep 16 2011 : 07:14:57 AM
Hi, nothing helped. The cpu history window was empty all the time but in the CPU column there was a value around 12% (I have 8 cores)

I made a screenshot of the thread window:



PS: When I have the "VA View" visible (which I don't have usually) the working time is twice as long.
feline Posted - Sep 15 2011 : 9:10:13 PM
Most of the ProcMon is simply VA interacting with its symbol database. Can you please run Process Explorer, go into Select Columns -> Process Performance, and turn on CPU History please:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653

It is possible the CPU spike is coming from something other than the IDE / VA. Both the IDE and VA will show up as the devenv.exe process. We have had occasional problems with anti-virus programs scanning / locking the files that make up VA's symbol database, so it is possible something like that is going on here.

If the CPU spike really is from devenv.exe can you please try turning off:

VA Outline
VA View
VA Options -> Advanced -> Display -> Display VA Navigation Bar:
VA Options -> Advanced -> Fonts and Colors -> Enable Enhanced Syntax Coloring

one by one, and see if any of this makes a difference.

Next, if none of this helps, can you please try pressing:

VA Options -> Performance -> Rebuild symbol databases

and restart the IDE.
kimbo Posted - Sep 15 2011 : 1:10:19 PM
There is no (or only a small) spike with a disabled VXA.

I logged the file access during the switch with ProcMon - maybe you see some interesting things in there: http://pastebin.com/9s6UWXTk
feline Posted - Sep 15 2011 : 12:14:14 PM
I am quite interested, and a little concerned, by the CPU spike when you switch back to the IDE. This is very unexpected.

Can you please try disabling VA with the IDE menu item:

VAssistX -> Enable/Disable Visual Assist X

and see if you still get this CPU spike on switching please.

This spike would seem to rule out displaying tooltips, since if I understand correctly, no tooltips are being shown simply by switching back to the IDE.
kimbo Posted - Sep 14 2011 : 4:04:56 PM
Thanks for the reply.

One core is complete busy for some seconds. The tooltip coloring was disabled all the time.

I tested it on several machines in my company. It seems to scale with the numbers of different signatures of a function (the Qt was only an example). Maybe VAX is collecting all the different headers for the tooltip.

Here on my bedbook I type in "QString x = QString( "" ).arg()" (the cursor is between the last braces), have to wait 3 seconds until the cpu is idle, press space, have to wait another 3 seconds. I can send you a video with a process monitor window if you want :)

Edit: When the cursor is between the braces in the example above, I get this cpu peak whenever I switch (with Alt+Tab or a mouse click) back to the VS window.
feline Posted - Sep 14 2011 : 12:46:16 PM
Can you try running a CPU monitor please, and see if you see a CPU spike when this slow down happens.

I have just tried this here, and I am not seeing any such slow down.

Does this only happen with Qt methods, or are you seeing it with other overloaded methods as well?

Can you try turning off:

VA Options -> Advanced -> Fonts and Colors -> Apply Colouring to -> Tooltips

and see if this makes any difference?
kimbo Posted - Sep 14 2011 : 03:38:41 AM
No, I'm inside the function header in my cpp file. For example if I have a function called getData(...) which has 20 different signatures and I type in "x = getData(_" ("_" is the cursor) then it takes a second for each following character.

A Qt example: When I type in "QString x = QString( "bla" ).arg(_" it's over for seconds :)

The cpp file itself isn't very big, the solution contains about 4k files with 500k lines of code.
feline Posted - Sep 13 2011 : 12:52:54 PM
Are you actually typing inside the header file "qstring.h"? Or are you just including it in the file you are editing?

I am not seeing any slow down problems when typing inside "qstring.h" from Qt 4.4.0

How many lines does the file you are working in have? There is a known problem where VA slows down in very large files, my test file for this effect is 23,000 lines long.

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