copying large string from clipboard is slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow

[Richard Gaskin]

See Brian's note to get where I was going with that.

I suggested comparing the speed with other programs because I'm assuming 
you're doing this for a worthwhile reason.  When we see how other apps 
compare with a similar task for their own reasons we begin to see the 
wide range of things that can sometimes happen moving lots of data to 
and from the system scrap.

An MD5 hash is not a Clipboard operation.  It doesn't need to integrate 
with the system's Clipboard subsystem, nor require reformatting the 
entire string as the Clipboard sometimes does.

"If you can drive one mile in a minute, shouldn't you be able to walk 
that in the same amount of time? After all, it's the same length." :)

Different operations take different amounts of time.

LC makes it easy to forget that, since it does so much of the work for 
us. Only by following the conversation around various Clipboard bug 
reports have I been able to begin to approximate an understanding of the 
complexity of the task.  LC is sometimes working really, really hard so 
we don't have to.

If the amount of time needed for that operation is prohibitive for what 
you need to do, I'm sure we can find an alternative method.  Maybe 
rawClipboardData will handle what you need.  Other methods may be 
available as well.  It all depends on what exactly you want to do. 
Sometimes we can learn by how other apps do that.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems


Tom Glod wrote:

> Hi Richard...to copy it from a custom property into a variable takes a
> blink of an eye.
> 
> the file is i think 4.5 mb or so.
> 
> takes 14ms seconds to do a md5 hash
> 
> its definitely the slowness of the clipboarddata function.
> 
> On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 5:25 PM, Richard Gaskin via use-livecode <
> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
>> Tom Glod wrote:
>>
>> > Hey Peeps... so I'm stress testing a clipboard tool I have been
>> > working on .....and copying a large key from the clipboard array into
>> > a variable (such as the king james bible from the guttenberg project)
>> > takes a really long time.
>>
>> What is the size? It's been a long time since I worked with that file.
>>
>>
>> > like 3 or 4 seconds ....(for each key)
>> >
>> > its a large string...but thats crazy.
>> >
>> > I'm copying from "the clipboarddata" ... not rawdata or fulldata.
>> >
>> > should i report bug? or is there a legit reason why this is so?
>>
>> Depends.  That's a very rare use case, one not likely optimized for by
>> many apps, or even the OS.
>>
>> So one way to get a feel for whether LC is indeed slow there is to compare
>> with another program:
>>
>> How long does it take to copy with the file is opened in Word?
>> And from WordPad?
>> Might also get comparisons with any other program you have lying around
>> that can be used for that.
>>
>> --
>>  Richard Gaskin