slooooowww typing in fields

[Timothy Miller]

Hi,

Maybe my computer is just too slow. 466 G4, OS 10.3.9, 768 MB physical RAM.

It's paradoxical, though. On some tasks, Rev is scary fast. Like lock 
message, lock screen, go to 1 card at a time in a big stack, looking 
for something specific. Practically instantaneous!

At other times...

I've complained before about the nightmarishly slow find and replace 
window -- if the stack has, say 300 cards, 100 fields per card, plus 
that many more buttons per card, and a lot of script.

Today, I'm asking about something else. I often type quite a lot of 
text into a single scrolling field. Like if I'm keeping a lot of 
notes on one topic in some stack.

Sometimes it works okay. At other times, there's a short delay from 
keyboard to screen. Sometimes the delay gets longer and longer, until 
the thing is just useless. Different things seem to get it moving 
along again. Saving the stack doesn't seem to do much -- maybe a 
little, sometimes. Exiting all other applications doesn't seem to do 
much. Saving and closing other stacks... I'm not sure. Inconsistent 
results, maybe. Quitting and restarting Rev usually helps. Whether 
I'm inserting text into the middle of a paragraph versus typing at 
the end of the field seems to make a difference.

Bg and stack scripts are one giant scrolling field, it appears. The 
same thing happens sometimes, but not always, when working in a bg or 
stack script with lots of handlers, lots of text.

What do I need to understand about this phenomenon? What's the trick 
to making it better?

Oddly, nothing like this ever happened in hyperCard. Same computer, 
older OS. Yet Rev is supposed to be faster than HC, at least in some 
ways, and OS X is supposed to be faster than OS 9.

I've heard that the right graphics card can speed up some Macintoshes 
running OS X. I'm told the graphics card will handle most of the 
number crunching necessary for the Aqua GUI, relieving the CPU and 
RAM of this chore. Would this help in my situation? I don't know much 
about my graphics card. It shipped with the machine. ATY,Rage 128 
Pro, it says here. 16 MB VRAM. I don't know if that's a lot or a 
little.

Would more physical RAM likely make a difference? I have an "activity 
monitor" utility. Rev doesn't seem to be maxxing out the RAM, even 
when other applications are running. But what do I know? Not much.

Thanks in advance,


Tim