IDE, engine, and font problems (part two)

[Scott Rossi]

Recently, Wilhelm Sanke wrote:

> I now have stumbled accross a real (negative)
> killer feature (for Windows XP) that I had attached to a three-year old
> rudimentary version of the color toolkit. I had experimented with using
> small thumb images as color and pattern input for further processing and
> transformation; this was achieved by setting the "screenmouseloc" to the
> pixels of a thumb image and then tranferring the "mousecolor" to the
> matrix of fields. At that time I was using Windows 98 and did not notice
> any delays.
> 
> When attaching this feature to my present version of the toolkit I got
> surprises:
> Scanning an area of 100X100 pixels of an imported thumb along with
> setting the backcolor of the corresponding chars in the pattern field
> took 36 seconds. Although I had set screenloc to true, the mousecursor
> was still visible, began very fast and showed a quick slowdown of its
> horizontal movements. After finishing the scan I got an error message
> "running low on memory, script aborted", most of the screen became
> white, and a number of controls appeared at odd places, some of them
> more than once. Closing the stack was hardly possible the normal way,
> you had to "grope in the dark" to find where the necessary part of the
> MenuBar had gone to. All this on a Windows XP computer with 2 GHz and 1
> GB RAM.

Have you looked at the resources being used/processor use while your script
is running?  The way you describe it sounds like your system might be
running out of resources and slowing down, near crashing.

A while ago I created a stack that moved around 30 to 40 translucent objects
around the screen simultaneously, and found that, while passable on Mac
systems, the same stack bogged down on Win2K and XP to the point where the
stack was unusable eventually crashed.  I made changes to the script to get
processor use down to around 80 percent and then experienced no further
crashes/slowdowns.

You might take a look at this if you haven't already.

Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director
Tactile Media, Multimedia & Design
-----
E: scott at tactilemedia.com
W: http://www.tactilemedia.com