Zugg Software :: View topic - [3.10a] BUG: Searching with package editor causes lag.

Magician Joined: 02 Feb 2004 Posts: 364 Location: USA

This is a bug I've been experiencing for a while. It appears when you search within the package editor and there are no results, it will cause Cmud to lag severely. Even after you close the package editor, if you did not clear the search it will continue to lag. It appears that the lag only occurs while cmud is receiving text from the mud. Here's an example of me sending 12 commands through at a time on Aetolia with timestamps:

No search active:

Magician Joined: 02 Feb 2004 Posts: 364 Location: USA

Also, if you're going to test it out on Aetolia, so that the environment is as similar as possible, I have an alias called 'cprompt' that will configure the prompt to match correctly.

Update: I was unable to reproduce this in a blank session. I would assume that the problem is either unique to my settings or it's related to package size.

Posted: Thu Oct 22, 2009 1:08 am

hmmm i'm not reproducing this, tried in one very large package, and in the all tab, it seems like it's something in your package

Magician Joined: 02 Feb 2004 Posts: 364 Location: USA

Trigger matching does not seem to be effected as there is no difference in Ctrl+Q test times. I run a rather large prompt trigger so my guess is it is the script speed being adversely effected.

Posted: Thu Oct 22, 2009 2:14 am

try disabling your prompt trigger, and then repeating the test?

I can see if you've a nasty prompt trigger causing some lag if you get a buncha prompts in a hurry but don't know why filtering thou settings in the PE would slow that down a lot, maybe if your updating a lot of variables and the package editor is trying to update the values?

Magician Joined: 02 Feb 2004 Posts: 364 Location: USA

The lag disappears when I disabled my two main prompt triggers, which makes sense seeing as they're the most complex triggers in my system. As to your suggestion about it trying to update, that would make sense except that it only lags when the search returns 0 results; If the search returns any results, then there's no issue.

Posted: Thu Oct 22, 2009 2:36 am

The Search feature is using the database "filter" system. Basically doing something like "SELECT * FROM Settings WHERE Script LIKE '%pattern%'". It sounds like SQLite has some overhead if this doesn't match any records in the database. There is little I can do about that.

My best guess is that your script is causing a variable to update, which then tells the database it needs to reapply the search query. You might try changing the Search query to only look for matches in the Name instead of the Name and Script value, which is the default. This will prevent changes to the variable value from causing the search filter to re-compute itself.

But in general, there will always be some amount of slowdown when viewing the Settings Editor while your scripts are updating in the background. The Settings Editor has some code to minimize the number of updates to the screen (like the treeview) as the internal database changes, but that is limited, and stuff like the search filter can certainly cause slowdowns.

Magician Joined: 02 Feb 2004 Posts: 364 Location: USA

Changing it to name only seems to cause a small improvement. Perhaps a check box to not have it continuously update the search, or just in the case that nothing returns the first time? Minor lag is an inconvenience but this is causing me to be completely locked out of CMUD at times, as I'm not even able to disabled triggers or cancel the search. I definitely don't see this as a huge issue since it's pretty obscure and easy to avoid.

Posted: Thu Oct 22, 2009 4:47 pm

You might also try turning off the "Auto Update" option in the View menu of the Settings Editor. That turns off the auto-update that might be causing the slowdown when your scripts are modifying the variables.

Also, if your Prompt triggers are modifying variables, and you don't need those variable values to carry over when you close/restart CMUD, then make sure to mark the "Use Default" option for each variable. This prevents changing the variable from updating the database, which makes your scripts faster and might reduce the amount of database updating being done in the settings editor.