AW: How do you handle the poor performance of LC 7?

[Richard Gaskin]

Tom Bodine wrote:
 > I am trying to move entirely to V7 engine, but as Brahmanathaswami
 > notes, 7.0.5 is makes it very hard with frequent and unpredictable
 > hard crashes. (I'm on Win 7. Yes, crash report filed, but not for
 > every crash because at this rate that would become about half my
 > work day.)
 >
 > Is the instability of 7.0.5  just on the Windows side or are Mac users
 > seeing this, too?
 >
 > It's hard to be optimistic when something that crashes as much as
 > 7.0.5 is labeled a "release candidate".

No optimism needed, just a cool head to think this through to come up 
with a diagnosis the team can work with.

It may be useful to remember that a crash you experience may not be 
experienced by others.  In fact, as I think back on the posts here I see 
a great many crashes discussed, but from a very small number of people.

This suggests there's something about the nature of those specific 
projects or the workflows used in making them which is exposing a 
weakness in the engine.

The weakness is there; I don't imagine anyone is inventing crash stories.

But empirically and anecdotally we know crashers are very rare among the 
thousands of projects LC is used on, and even in cases like yours 
unpredictably intermittent among sessions with the same project, as you 
described.

Given that each release has passed internal manual review and automated 
testing, and that most of us aren't reporting crashers (I haven't seen a 
crash in a long time, and I spend most of my time in the least-supported 
platform of all, Linux), it's helpful to try to identify the specific 
causes of the crash so that it becomes possible for the team to see them.

Once seen, issues like that are often easy to fix, and crashers get a 
high priority.

But first it must be seen.  And it's probably not something easily seen 
or the rest of us would be seeing it too.

Every problem can be solved by identifying the differences between the 
working and non-working states.  Once identified, in deterministic 
systems like software working through that list will always find the 
root cause.  In more than 25 years of making software I've never seen a 
bug yet that couldn't be isolated through this process (some more easily 
than others <g>).

Let's start with the basics:  what platform are you on, and what does 
your app do?

Have you found some activities that never crash, and others where the 
crashes occur?   If so, can you describe the nature of those activities 
where crashes have occurred - connecting to databases, handling sockets, 
rendering graphics, etc?

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  LiveCode Community Manager
  richard at livecode.com