Slow LC 9 Performance - Test Stack, Video, QA Report

[Curry Kenworthy]

Mark Wieder:

 > I'm suspicious enough of the sleight-of-hand that underpins the
 > use of unquoted string literals not to trust the easy answers, ...

Bob S:

 > That's the first thing I thought.

Interesting considerations. Whatever the causes, LC 9 needs a little 
work to get back in shape. Get off the couch and start running again! :) 
There are so many different tasks where 9 is underperforming; any code 
with repeat loops, chunks, arrays, or math is likely to be slow compared 
to where we were 2 years ago. Mac is affected just as badly as Windows. 
Linux is affected too.

BTW Bob, Mark, Jerry, and others following this thread - could you also 
add your CC to the bug report in the QA center?

https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=21561

We need to get this problem squared away so that our LC code can 
accomplish greater things, and nothing says "it's important, it's pretty 
urgent" like more emails in the CC list.

Anyone with more than a few lines of code is likely to benefit from this 
effort. Any serious code written in LCS, especially any code for working 
with data or calculations. Do you want your own code (and the extensions 
you use) to run faster or slower - if you like your code to be in shape 
and run a decent mile, please take a moment to join this bug report.

And if anyone has sample code that hints at more (or more specific) 
problem areas to help pinpoint the issues, don't be shy! I believe a 
number of areas are affected, but who knows, maybe the root cause could 
be the same.

Working on a WordLib update during the last few weeks has given me a 
good opportunity to observe the slowdown, because WordLib supports both 
LC 6 and 9, and it also requires thousands of tests with hundreds of 
documents to test fixes and ensure quality.

So I measure speed too while I'm at it. Testing various code changes, I 
could see there are many coding tasks that LC 6 absolutely loves, even 
speeding up, while 9 just slows down. I ran into more potential problem 
areas that need to be isolated into test code once I sort them out, but 
may not get a chance to do so for a little while. Plus I may be missing 
something important. So if you have sample code that tests something I 
haven't, please post it. Thanks.

(WordLib release will be out soon!)

Best wishes,

Curry Kenworthy

Custom Software Development
LiveCode Training and Consulting
http://livecodeconsulting.com/