4 ms·

Doing GUI calls is a notorious way to slow down apps. I sped up an app (major software from major large corporation) by a factor of 10x a few years back by remo

Doing GUI calls is a notorious way to slow down apps. I sped up an app (major software from major large corporation) by a factor of 10x a few years back by removing GUI updates. What you have to do is create a thread that refreshes the GUI periodically and not let your main worker thread ever work on the GUI. This particular app was an Eclipse Plugin (a source control app) and the Eclipse SWT to update the console log window was being called after every file operation (of which there were 10s of thousands). All I did was move the GUI refreshing into it's own thread, and call it only every 250millis or so. I was hailed a hero, and deservedly so, for speeding up our app by 10X and was one of my most satisfying accomplishments in my software career.

cdr 11y ago
When I gave the Nexus Mod Manager a try a little while ago, I wondered how it managed to take 18 hours to copy a few hundred files from one directory to another - on a SSD. Wouldn't be surprised if this was at least part of it.
- beerbajay 11y ago
  Nexus Mod Manager is impressively bad. The interface is insanely laggy; select a mod, wait a second, list starts to refresh, wait a second, list finishes refreshing, wait a second, the mod info shows up. It's really easy to do things by mistake because of the lagginess (and probably just generally poor quality of programming). It has multithreaded downloads, but even these are messed up. Every time I tried them about 50% of the downloads got corrupted.
nicklo 11y ago
This strategy is also encouraged by best iOS development practices (main thread never works on GUI). Edit: 'main' as in the one doing the one doing the work, in the same spirit of the original post. In truth, the true main thread that runs in main() is where all the iOS GUI work happens. Apologies for the confusing wording.
- panic 11y ago
  This is backward. Since UIKit is single threaded, the main thread must work on GUI: the best practice is that nothing except GUI work should happen there.
  - ninkendo 11y ago
    You're not being charitable enough to the comment... you two are in completely agreement with one another if you only changed the meaning of the word "main". It's clear the grandparent meant "the thread that's doing the work."
    - mikeash 11y ago
      It's really difficult to get to that meaning, because "main thread" is what you call the thread where main() is invoked and which is where all the GUI calls must happen. You can't use a common term in context to mean something different from its common meaning and expect people to follow.
      - dagss 11y ago
        And yet it was perfectly obvious what was meant. If you just assume the person who made the comment is not stupid/rambling (difficult concept, I know...) it is not difficult to get the meaning at all.
        talmand 11y ago
        I think it's just a "my environment" bias thing going. I don't work on iOS and I immediately understood what was meant by the comment. Of course, the "my environment" bias may also include a degree of the "other" is not as bright as me.
        mikeash 11y ago
        You say it was perfectly obvious, I say it's almost impossible for someone steeped in iOS development to understand any way other than the way I said. Even given a huge amount of charity to the poster, the best I can do is "I have no idea what they mean by this." How come we have to give this person the benefit of the doubt to the point of understanding a term to mean its exact opposite, but you don't have to give us any of that?
KG8 11y ago
Years ago had a similar albeit smaller discovery. Loading a flash application with a progress bar and setting the quality option to the lowest quality made the bar go faster.
- macNchz 11y ago
  I remember having a few tricks like that–I vaguely remember moving bits of the GUI for some apps off screen so they wouldn't get drawn and thus run faster.
technomancy 11y ago
> What you have to do is create a thread [...] A thread? But that'll never scale!
- yeukhon 11y ago
  What do you want? a whole new process? That doesn't scale either. Come on.
  - jlas 11y ago
    What we need is to put this into a Docker container then parallelize the cloud instances using asynchronous message brokers enterprise
    - JetSpiegel 11y ago
      Enterprise-grade GUI
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- est 11y ago
  you dont need a cluster to display GUIs.
  - y4mi 11y ago
    are you sure? it might be a really big screen!
  - notalaser 11y ago
    You should think big. The cloud is the future of GUIs.
- sombremesa 11y ago
  It's Eclipse. It'll never scale regardless.
IshKebab 11y ago
> I sped up an app by a factor of 10x Woah > This particular app was an Eclipse Plugin Ah ha ok so it just runs fairly slow now right? :)
stcredzero 11y ago
Doing GUI calls is a notorious way to slow down apps. Seriously. One notable Smalltalker sped up the compiler in VisualWorks this way. Yes, there is a compiler in Smalltalk, it just usually only compiles one method at a time, which had a lot to do with why no one noticed that printing notifications to the transcript took up most of the time. So for a bulk code load, turning off the notification sped up "compile time" a whole lot. In fact, the JIT-ed Smalltalk in VisualWorks actually outperformed the C/YACC implemented compiler in a different Smalltalk. Someone needs to keep track of this stuff. Why do we keep making the same mistakes over the decades? (Insert famous Alan Kay quote here.)

cdr 11y ago

When I gave the Nexus Mod Manager a try a little while ago, I wondered how it managed to take 18 hours to copy a few hundred files from one directory to another - on a SSD. Wouldn't be surprised if this was at least part of it.

beerbajay 11y ago
Nexus Mod Manager is impressively bad. The interface is insanely laggy; select a mod, wait a second, list starts to refresh, wait a second, list finishes refreshing, wait a second, the mod info shows up. It's really easy to do things by mistake because of the lagginess (and probably just generally poor quality of programming). It has multithreaded downloads, but even these are messed up. Every time I tried them about 50% of the downloads got corrupted.

nicklo 11y ago

This strategy is also encouraged by best iOS development practices (main thread never works on GUI). Edit: 'main' as in the one doing the one doing the work, in the same spirit of the original post. In truth, the true main thread that runs in main() is where all the iOS GUI work happens. Apologies for the confusing wording.

panic 11y ago
This is backward. Since UIKit is single threaded, the main thread must work on GUI: the best practice is that nothing except GUI work should happen there.
- ninkendo 11y ago
  You're not being charitable enough to the comment... you two are in completely agreement with one another if you only changed the meaning of the word "main". It's clear the grandparent meant "the thread that's doing the work."
  - mikeash 11y ago
    It's really difficult to get to that meaning, because "main thread" is what you call the thread where main() is invoked and which is where all the GUI calls must happen. You can't use a common term in context to mean something different from its common meaning and expect people to follow.
    - dagss 11y ago
      And yet it was perfectly obvious what was meant. If you just assume the person who made the comment is not stupid/rambling (difficult concept, I know...) it is not difficult to get the meaning at all.
      - talmand 11y ago
        I think it's just a "my environment" bias thing going. I don't work on iOS and I immediately understood what was meant by the comment. Of course, the "my environment" bias may also include a degree of the "other" is not as bright as me.
      - mikeash 11y ago
        You say it was perfectly obvious, I say it's almost impossible for someone steeped in iOS development to understand any way other than the way I said. Even given a huge amount of charity to the poster, the best I can do is "I have no idea what they mean by this." How come we have to give this person the benefit of the doubt to the point of understanding a term to mean its exact opposite, but you don't have to give us any of that?

KG8 11y ago

Years ago had a similar albeit smaller discovery. Loading a flash application with a progress bar and setting the quality option to the lowest quality made the bar go faster.

macNchz 11y ago
I remember having a few tricks like that–I vaguely remember moving bits of the GUI for some apps off screen so they wouldn't get drawn and thus run faster.

technomancy 11y ago

> What you have to do is create a thread [...] A thread? But that'll never scale!

yeukhon 11y ago
What do you want? a whole new process? That doesn't scale either. Come on.
- jlas 11y ago
  What we need is to put this into a Docker container then parallelize the cloud instances using asynchronous message brokers enterprise
  - JetSpiegel 11y ago
    Enterprise-grade GUI
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
est 11y ago
you dont need a cluster to display GUIs.
- y4mi 11y ago
  are you sure? it might be a really big screen!
- notalaser 11y ago
  You should think big. The cloud is the future of GUIs.
sombremesa 11y ago
It's Eclipse. It'll never scale regardless.

IshKebab 11y ago

> I sped up an app by a factor of 10x Woah > This particular app was an Eclipse Plugin Ah ha ok so it just runs fairly slow now right? :)

stcredzero 11y ago

Doing GUI calls is a notorious way to slow down apps. Seriously. One notable Smalltalker sped up the compiler in VisualWorks this way. Yes, there is a compiler in Smalltalk, it just usually only compiles one method at a time, which had a lot to do with why no one noticed that printing notifications to the transcript took up most of the time. So for a bulk code load, turning off the notification sped up "compile time" a whole lot. In fact, the JIT-ed Smalltalk in VisualWorks actually outperformed the C/YACC implemented compiler in a different Smalltalk. Someone needs to keep track of this stuff. Why do we keep making the same mistakes over the decades? (Insert famous Alan Kay quote here.)