Revolution is very slow to refresh fields. How can I speed it up?

[Richard Gaskin]

Eric Colvin wrote:
> One thing I¹ve hit upon early on that annoys me a little.  Though Revolution
> is far newer, and loads into memory rather than writing to disk, it is still
> way slower at certain things ­ such as refreshing text fields ­ than
> Hypercard ever was.

Rev blazes.  In most cases you can compare Rev's performance on 24-bit
displays to HyperCard's monochrome architecture and still come out
ahead.  But of course that requires that the test be done on the same OS.

What you're seeing is the slowness of Quartz, not Rev.

As Jim Hurley notes, add "wait 0 with messages" inside your loop to tell 
Rev to let the OS to catch up with it.  He says the lead engineer will 
be changing the refresh mechanism to handle that automatically in the 
future.

Here's a loosely related tip that helps illustrate the difference
between what Rev does and how hard the OS has to work to try to keep up
with it:

In my WebMerge product, the main task focuses around a complex process 
that can take several minutes to complete.  In older versions I had my 
progress bar set to increment once through each item in my loop.  Later 
I found that if I only update it every 20th time through the loop the
smoothness of the progress bar was nearly the same -- but overall
performance nearly doubled!  That one line of code for the OS to update 
the progress bar was costing as much as 500 lines of data slicing and 
dicing.

Rev is fast.  Quartz is merely pretty.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
  _______________________________________________________
  Rev tips, tutorials and more: http://www.revJournal.com