I have done some test today comparing the old neooffice to the new one. Except one test (switching from a control properties to another in a form) the old neooffice is still faster that the new one, and many test shows there is no speed difference at all.
Really? I noticed that you are still using Mac OS X 10.3.5 which was known as having many bugs. I develop and test on 10.3.9 as well as the latest Tiger and on those machines and on my machines operations like scrolling and full screen presentation drawing are significantly faster with the performance patch. The difference that I see is very clear.
Also, are you sure that your machine isn't swapping memory? If you don't have enough physical memory to run Neo/J and your other applications, Mac OS X will use disk as virtual memory. Once this starts happening, any performance improvements in my code will not help as the time spent by the OS moving memory blocks between disk and physical memory is a slow process.
On my machine, I have 768 MB of memory and I usually only run Neo/J, Mozilla, Terminal, and iChat so I rarely have memory swapping. However, when I launched the GNU debugger (gdb), memory swapping starts and I will usually a very obvious decrease in performance.
Although I have tried to test this patch as thoroughly as possible, a large percentage of the Neo/J code has changed so I think this patch will need a lot of testing.
Right after I finished a build with the 1.1.5 source....
Anyway, is this on HEAD or did you make a different branch to get the sources.
I tested neooffice on my mac mini 512mb 10.3.9, only neooffice and itunes opened. I'll call neooffice/j based on java 1.3 as N3 and the neooffice based on java 1.4 as N4
I opened a complex form database with N3 and it takes 6 second to open it. I minimize it to the dock and "reopen" it in 0 second.
I open the same form using N4 and it seems faster, 'cause begin to draw before N3, but when it ends to draw the time passed is the same (6 sec). I minimize it to the dock and reopen it, and N4 redraw the form again (!), losing 2 seconds...
Same thing opening a complex write page full of draw: N4 gives a better feedback showing the page drawing under your eyes, but takes 10 seconds to draw all the page. N3 'sleeps' for 8 seconds, but after shows the full page ready.
After I tryed a old silly macro that copy some cells from a table, write the value on a file, jump to another table, scrolls down for many cells looking for a empty one and finally read the values from the file and put the values in the empy cells.
The scroll down is much slower in N4 that N3: N3 takes 18 second to end the macro, while N4 needs 29 seconds to end.
The only test N4 was faster that N3 was in 'control properties' window in forms: moving from one control to another need 2 seconds to N3 to refresh the window, while N4 was 0 seconds.
At the end I opened a complex form, a complex calc file, a draw file and a write file full of images: N3 uses 220Mb and 1gb of virtual memory, N4 uses 264Mb and 700mb of virtual memory.
It is not an exaustive test, but I simply test some things I do often in a normal working day. There is not criticism here, I'm only trying to understand the power and the fault of this new version.
As personal impression this neooffice N4 gives me idea of something ever drawing and redrawing, windows are ever drawing or redrawing something, it is a strange effect.
Posted: Mon Sep 26, 2005 9:27 am Post subject: Re: NeoOffice/J Performance Patch Ready for Testing
Anonymous wrote:
FYI, even though NeoOffice/J Release Candidate Patch 9 is the equivalent of the final, you will need to download the final before installing the patch as the installer doesn't recognize the RC.
Is there a way to trick the installer by changing manually some bits? I'm on dialup these days and have only the RC installed.
Posted: Mon Sep 26, 2005 9:31 am Post subject: Re: NeoOffice/J Performance Patch Ready for Testing
Anonymous wrote:
FYI, even though NeoOffice/J Release Candidate Patch 9 is the equivalent of the final, you will need to download the final before installing the patch as the installer doesn't recognize the RC.
I found that out, too.
Startup time has not changed significantly for me, either, btw. Still pretty slow.
And as others mentioned, I miss the nice, light-grey border.
Last edited by JCG on Mon Sep 26, 2005 9:40 am; edited 1 time in total
Same thing opening a complex write page full of draw: N4 gives a better feedback showing the page drawing under your eyes, but takes 10 seconds to draw all the page. N3 'sleeps' for 8 seconds, but after shows the full page ready.It is not an exaustive test, but I simply test some things I do often in a normal working day. There is not criticism here, I'm only trying to understand the power and the fault of this new version.
OK. This makes a lot more sense. I've noticed that image drawing speed hasn't changed between Java 1.3.1 and Java 1.4.x. Most of the speed increases seem to be in drawing shapes, XOR drawing, and moving painted areas of a window to another portion of the window (e.g. scrolling).
fabrizio venerandi wrote:
As personal impression this neooffice N4 gives me idea of something ever drawing and redrawing, windows are ever drawing or redrawing something, it is a strange effect.
I agree that at first this effect is strange. What you now see is all of the drawing the OOo code actually does. Before, all of that drawing that you now see was being done but it was being drawn to a big offscreen image and then, every once in a while, I would copy the offscreen image to the window. That process was very CPU and memory intensive but, I admit, it did smooth out all of the redundant OOo drawing.
There are a few tricks that I can try to reduce the frequency that Mac OS X flushes drawing operations to the screen. Hopefully, these tricks will reduce the amount of flicker that you see.
OK. This makes a lot more sense. I've noticed that image drawing speed hasn't changed between Java 1.3.1 and Java 1.4.x. Most of the speed increases seem to be in drawing shapes, XOR drawing, and moving painted areas of a window to another portion of the window (e.g. scrolling).
I understand. It is strange that the macro I wrote is more slow scrolling cells in calc...
Quote:
I agree that at first this effect is strange. What you now see is all of the drawing the OOo code actually does. Before, all of that drawing that you now see was being done but it was being drawn to a big offscreen image and then, every once in a while, I would copy the offscreen image to the window. That process was very CPU and memory intensive but, I admit, it did smooth out all of the redundant OOo drawing.
Yes, actually if I resize a Write window, all the window content (icons too) became white until I release the mouse button. So, everytime I resize a window Oo clear the content and redraw all. This could be the Truth, but I'm not ready for the blue pill. I mean this is disturbing while you are working. And text too, scrolling pages you can see the text 'going' over the white pages (scrolling, I see the white page and after the text going over the page, line by line if is a poem).
Quote:
There are a few tricks that I can try to reduce the frequency that Mac OS X flushes drawing operations to the screen. Hopefully, these tricks will reduce the amount of flicker that you see.
I'm ready to test your tricks
I'd like to read other users feedback too.
BTW I can confirm that many input windows do not have the right 'attention' from neooffice: all my macros using inputbox command comes up but the cursor is not inside the input space, as some OK button in warning windows. Everytime I need to click the window to have it 'active' before type.
So far, similar experience to others with 'N4', but to add:
i) font Helvetica Neue is displayed very faint, as if 20% Grey instead of black (appeared black in 1.3.1 NeoJ and in X11 etc.)
ii) on my 400MHz tibook, disconcerting when scrolling up/down docs with my mouse's scrollwheel: the text scrolls, and once it's finished, then the scrollbar catches up with it
Nice snappy windows, and save dialogue is a lot quicker too.
i) font Helvetica Neue is displayed very faint, as if 20% Grey instead of black (appeared black in 1.3.1 NeoJ and in X11 etc.)
Are you sure that you aren't using the Helvetica Neue UltraLight font? The UltraLight variant is very, very light.
yoxi wrote:
ii) on my 400MHz tibook, disconcerting when scrolling up/down docs with my mouse's scrollwheel: the text scrolls, and once it's finished, then the scrollbar catches up with it
I am not sure what you are describing. When I use my mouse's scrollwheel, Neo/J seems to track the mouse wheel movement pretty closely.
Joined: Sep 18, 2003 Posts: 434 Location: London, UK
Posted: Mon Sep 26, 2005 3:47 pm Post subject:
Wrt to the fonts - I was using Gill Sans Bold as a substitute screen font for Arial (for the dialogues etc). In N3 this worked fine, but with N4, it switched to Gill Sans Light for display, even though Gill Sans Bold was still selected in the Preferences - it simply won't use the Bold variant.
Also, opening a document created in N3 which used Gill Sans Bold Italic - the font was displaying as Gill Sans Light. I had to select the text and apply Bold and Italic styles for it to display correctly (i.e. com-B and com-I - selecting the Gill Sans Bold Italic style again had no effect).
Edit: Incidentally, although this is probably a bug it does lead to the bonus side-effect of improving compatibility with MS Office 2004 (overcoming the issues I described in this thread - there is no longer any need for the font substitution to occur!)
Edit 2: Looking a little further into this, I'm seeing similar issues with Futura - the style selected is being ignored and the text defaults to Futura "Medium". To get Bold, Italic etc, you have to use com-B, com-I etc. That is, the Font family is defaulting to a particular style, and selecting other styles from the Font menu has no effect. To get other font styles you have to physically apply them using the toolbar buttons/keyboard shortcuts. This is more akin to the method used in MS Office 2004 which is potentially a good thing, but is potentially very confusing because the different styles are still being listed in the Font menu when, ideally, only the default style for each font would be.
Bugzilla isn't working for me at present, otherwise I would submit a report with screen shots. _________________ PBG4, 1.5GHz, SuperDrive, 1GB RAM, 128MB VRAM, 5400rpm 80GB HD, MacOS X 10.4.5
Joined: Sep 18, 2003 Posts: 434 Location: London, UK
Posted: Mon Sep 26, 2005 3:49 pm Post subject:
Wrt scrolling with a scroll wheel - is sometimes very jumpy for me. It scrolls down then jumps back to where it started, scrolls down then jumps back a bit again. Not all the time, but too often! _________________ PBG4, 1.5GHz, SuperDrive, 1GB RAM, 128MB VRAM, 5400rpm 80GB HD, MacOS X 10.4.5
Posted: Tue Sep 27, 2005 12:08 am Post subject: Presentations
I'm on vacation at present so I'm not in a position to test across the usual range of computers. But testing very informally at home (700MHz iBook, 640MB RAM), my initial impression is that viewing PowerPoint presentations in Impress is being significantly improved as a result of this patch, with much less lag-time required between one slide and the next. A very positive development. Thanks, Patrick (and to your current sponsors). _________________ Ray Saunders
World Scout Bureau
i) font Helvetica Neue is displayed very faint, as if 20% Grey instead of black (appeared black in 1.3.1 NeoJ and in X11 etc.)
Are you sure that you aren't using the Helvetica Neue UltraLight font? The UltraLight variant is very, very light.
In the font list, it gives me all the variants of Helvetica Neue, and I'm just choosing the one called plain old Helvetica Neue, which in NeoJ j3 (and all other apps) displays as something like Helvetica Neue 50 (in OS9 you get the font in different weights from 20-80 with 25-85 being the italic versions). In NeoJ j4 maybe it is being displayed as UltraUltraLight:
pluby wrote:
yoxi wrote:
ii) on my 400MHz tibook, disconcerting when scrolling up/down docs with my mouse's scrollwheel: the text scrolls, and once it's finished, then the scrollbar catches up with it
I am not sure what you are describing. When I use my mouse's scrollwheel, Neo/J seems to track the mouse wheel movement pretty closely.
Specifically, for example in a spreadsheet, when I scroll up/down with the scrollwheel - the data in the main window scrolls up or down, and then only after it has reached its new resting place, the 'bar' in the scrollbar (the bit that you click on to scroll using the mouse itself, and which tells you how far down the doc/sheet you are) updates its position. There's a noticeable lag between the one and the other which probably doesn't manifest on a faster mac. This isn't a complaint or a bug report, really - almost everyone has a faster computer than this! I was just making an observation about change of behaviour beteeen versions - I'm used to seeing this action happen simultaneously in NeoJ and other apps.
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