Windows Standalone Performance

[Bob Sneidar]

Hi all. 

Just wanted to give a heads up on what I think is the greatest Windows Standalone performance killer. 

When I first began to develop, it was done entirely on a Mac, and before I had any thought about how a standalone would work in a multiuser environment. As such, it was easy for me to simply save anything I wanted to persist between sessions as aomething in the stack, a settings card at first, then later as properties of each stack and the main stack. To ensure that these properties persisted I saved each sub stack when I updated any of those properties. 

On a Mac, for whatever reason, the performance hit was insignificant. On WINDOWS however, it became painfully clear to me that the performance penalty was VERY substantial! I can watch the folder containing the standalone stacks, see the temp files being created, one mississippi, two mississippi, three mississippi, around 4 misssissippi the temp file goes away. 

Since I do a lot of setup, I was saving the stack(s) multiple times just launching the app! And it was killing the performance. After putting in the condition not (the platform contains "WIN") before my save statements, performance, while not up to snuff compared to the MacOS, is actually quite acceptable. 

If you are saving your stacks by script when opening and closing, and you are experiencing long delays, consider going a different route. In fact, consider moving all your "settings" and persistent data to a memory array or database, and then writing it to disk either occassionally during idle time, or on quit. 

Bob S