Author Topic: Plus slow to respond when switching between applications  (Read 3573 times)

Offline pstagg

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Plus slow to respond when switching between applications
« on: July 10, 2019, 01:54:10 AM »
When switching between another application (e.g. Chrome) and Plus it can take ~5 second for Plus to come to the front and take focus.

Attached PM_log.zip

Model Name:   MacBook Pro
  Model Identifier:   MacBookPro14,2
  Processor Name:   Intel Core i5
  Processor Speed:   3.1 GHz
  Number of Processors:   1
  Total Number of Cores:   2
  L2 Cache (per Core):   256 KB
  L3 Cache:   4 MB
  Hyper-Threading Technology:   Enabled
  Memory:   8 GB


Offline Kirk Baker

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Re: Plus slow to respond when switching between applications
« Reply #1 on: July 10, 2019, 06:41:23 AM »
When switching between another application (e.g. Chrome) and Plus it can take ~5 second for Plus to come to the front and take focus.

What kind(s) of Contact Sheet tabs did you have open in PM+?  Any folder-based tabs?  Search-based tabs?

-Kirk

Offline esambo

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Re: Plus slow to respond when switching between applications
« Reply #2 on: July 10, 2019, 07:39:54 AM »
I have seen delays when switching back from other apps to Photo Mechanic Plus of 2-5seconds, which is very frustrating. But my Activity Monitor.app Memory shows that the “Swap Used” is > 4 GB. Activity Monitor.app Memory also shows that the Photo Mechanic Plus Process has a Memory usage of 2.50 GB (for a single subfolder based contact sheet showing 5,700 filtered (tagged) photos)

Offline Hayo Baan

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Re: Plus slow to respond when switching between applications
« Reply #3 on: July 10, 2019, 07:47:05 AM »
I have seen delays when switching back from other apps to Photo Mechanic Plus of 2-5seconds, which is very frustrating. But my Activity Monitor.app Memory shows that the “Swap Used” is > 4 GB. Activity Monitor.app Memory also shows that the Photo Mechanic Plus Process has a Memory usage of 2.50 GB (for a single subfolder based contact sheet showing 5,700 filtered (tagged) photos)

2.5GB for that amount of images doesn't feel too bad, BUT if your swap file is 4GB, there is likely a lot of swapping going on, this will severely hamper PM and could well be the (main) reason for the delay. It would be interesting to know what other applications you have running that eat up the rest of the memory… Do you use Chrome by any chance? Chrome is a notorious memory (and CPU) hog so might well be the culprit here.

This might also apply to the issue of the original poster @pstagg, can you check memory consumption/sawp space with Activity Monitor?
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Offline esambo

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Re: Plus slow to respond when switching between applications
« Reply #4 on: July 10, 2019, 08:03:28 PM »
Yes, I do use Google Chrome, and tend to have several dozen tabs open. And sometimes I even have some Java based apps open too. I’m aware that it does cause a lot of swapping, even with 16GB of RAM. I sometimes have to quit Google Chrome in order to work with PM+ more smoothly.
Switching back to PM+ just feels very different than with any of the other apps. I guess Google Chrome only has to switch back to a single tab and doesn’t bother loading any of the hidden tabs into memory, so there is not much of a visual delay switching to Chrome, although switching among the tabs does sometime require a second or two to load the tab content, but it does switch to the initially empty tab immediately, so there is an intuitive feedback that things are working.
But PM+ doesn’t render anything for several seconds, and the end user (me), is still looking at the previous app he just intended to switch away from, wondering if something failed to work.
Rendering PM+ with an empty contact sheet without a delay would be a more intuitive user experience. The next thing would be to load the visible pictures, and only then, all the pictures currently out of sight.
I believe that Apple iOS even takes screenshots of apps before switching away from an app, so that switching back to it works even faster (although it always is confusing when iOS messes up and I sometimes see a flickering image of an old state of an app).
Anyways, there are a lot more important things to work on in PM+ than this unintuitively slow responding UX.

Offline Kirk Baker

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Re: Plus slow to respond when switching between applications
« Reply #5 on: July 10, 2019, 08:18:34 PM »
Yes, I do use Google Chrome, and tend to have several dozen tabs open. And sometimes I even have some Java based apps open too. I’m aware that it does cause a lot of swapping, even with 16GB of RAM. I sometimes have to quit Google Chrome in order to work with PM+ more smoothly.
Switching back to PM+ just feels very different than with any of the other apps. I guess Google Chrome only has to switch back to a single tab and doesn’t bother loading any of the hidden tabs into memory, so there is not much of a visual delay switching to Chrome, although switching among the tabs does sometime require a second or two to load the tab content, but it does switch to the initially empty tab immediately, so there is an intuitive feedback that things are working.
But PM+ doesn’t render anything for several seconds, and the end user (me), is still looking at the previous app he just intended to switch away from, wondering if something failed to work.
Rendering PM+ with an empty contact sheet without a delay would be a more intuitive user experience. The next thing would be to load the visible pictures, and only then, all the pictures currently out of sight.
I believe that Apple iOS even takes screenshots of apps before switching away from an app, so that switching back to it works even faster (although it always is confusing when iOS messes up and I sometimes see a flickering image of an old state of an app).
Anyways, there are a lot more important things to work on in PM+ than this unintuitively slow responding UX.

Generally what PM is going to be doing when you resume it is scanning the folders that you have open as contact sheets.  There's no such thing as a free lunch and it takes time to scan folders and check for changes.

-Kirk