I was humbly wondering if there are any plans on the horizon to optimize the UI redraw performance.
Granted, my mac has seen about half a decade's worth of action, and I know Java in OSX is an uphill battle, but man, I'm talking click-[1.2sec]-drag. It feels like the UI is running on its knees, despite patching offline and with nothing else going on. I find myself reaching for PD way too often just to get the sketch down before the ideas turn to vapour.
Is it the same on Windows?
My desktop Windows PC is 7 years old and I haven't experienced unreasonable sluggish UI behavior.
Which version of OSX? Some machine specs?
EDITED: realised @spinus said this happens when axoloti is not connected, so cannot be the USB issue.
I have same experience on my home PC with Win10 and Core 2 Duo processor when patch is connections-heavy.
Okay, Ive moved the topic... as seems more like an issue than a wish/improvement 
@kausto , can you also confirm, this is issue is also present when the axoloti board is not connected.
the reason is we already have a 'known' issue, but I want to ensure this is unrelated:
this issue can only occur when the board is connected, and so the USB connection is active, it was reported against Mac/Linux, but there is a chance it is on all platforms.
also.. is this issue for all UI activities, or worst when dragging objects, or connecting wires... (e.g. do the menus work quickly). are some operations not sluggish (e.g. opening object browser, or creating new objects)
Which version of OSX? Some machine specs?
Macbook Pro 13 2009
Core2 Duo P8400, 2.26GHz, 4GB
Nvidia 9400m
10.8.5
Thank you @thetechnobear for moving the topic!
For me, the whole UI gets somewhat progressively slower, but dragging/connecting and especially scrolling while dragging seems disproportionately more bogged down.
I'll perform some more concise testing this afternoon.
no problem, sorry, I got your above reply, 'out of sync' I missed it when I moved the topic initially
yeah, as a background... what Im trying to determine is....
is it something else (not graphics) like USB traffic that is burning CPU cycles on your computer?
actually check the CPU usage, with activity monitor, in the following circumstances
- axoloti UI open, Axoloti not connected...
- axoloti UI open, Axoloti connected, not editing
- axoloti UI open, Axoloti not connected, editing
- axoloti UI open, Axoloti connected, editing
and then as you say, see if there are any common things which are worst than others...
e.g. sometimes axoloti will need to 'repaint' the entire canvas, at others it will just have to refresh a part of it. so if its a graphics issue, I think we'd expect the former to be an issue... but not so much the later.
I've run Axoloti on an ARM board with unaccelerated X, and it performed like you said even for simple patches. Unusable, sadly. It's clock-for-clock probably a little slower than my regular laptop, and I/O performance
I don't know anything about Java and OS X, but I sort of assumed that the patcher's patching area was doing a bunch of 2D drawing that's helped greatly by acceleration (maybe the curved lines?). But I'm just making that up, could be unrelated.
When editing patcher 'fdn container' of this patch
LushFDN.axp (93.4 KB)
- axoloti UI open, Axoloti not connected - 2%
- axoloti UI open, Axoloti not connected, editing - 17-24% when dragging objects
- axoloti UI open, Axoloti connected, not editing - 18-20%
- axoloti UI open, Axoloti connected, editing - 24-31%
thanks @kausto
ok, so we can see the USB connection issue. but your also saying its a problem when the USB is not connected?
Im doing some testing now ....
Ive got a (very) old 2006 MBP 2.33 Ghz/3GB ram, which I'm upgrading to 10.7.5 as we speak (its taken about an hour so far!) ... so will test with that, that has ATI Radeon X1600 256MB graphics card - so we will see with that. Id expect that to perform worst than @spinus laptop.
(However, I will say now, its a 'clean' machine, as I had to reinstall OSX due to a HD failure... which might also fail during the upgrade 
)
In the meantime, I did test Axoloti on an old iMac I have , a 2008 3Ghz, 6GB ram.. and Axoloti worked fine on that, I opened up the tybett patch and started moving things, and could not see any appreciable lag.
(as suggest though, I did not have an Axoloti connected)
please bare in mind, I don't use these machines for axoloti... they are just used by my girlfriend for web browsing, until they die, which I suspect wont be too long, anyway, so I can only report what they are like with a quick test, Ive not spent hours patching on them, to notice any short term peaks.
ok, thats odd...
so my 2006 MBP C2D 2.33 Ghz/3GB ram, running 10.7.5 , works fine with Axoloti...
(I used 1.0.9, but its not changed since the beginning... the iMac i tested above, has a really old version of axoloti on it)
if it weren't for the fact, I have better machines, its display is a bit dodgy, the keyboard is falling apart, and the the hard disk is about to fail - id be perfect happy using it
for reference, this is how I tested:
open up a few axoloti patches, bigger ones like tybett ... added objects, connected wires, drag a few objects around, selected many objects dragged... select the entire patch dragged. all was fine, certainly no delays of a second, or any real delay I could detect.
I did this with both the axoloti connected and unconnected, and actually it didn't make any real difference.
(I didn't look at the cpu, as it was working fine, Im sure it was higher cpu, but... not so it was a problem)
as I pointed out though, this machine is a pretty clean install of OSX, with just axoloti and I think chrome and firefox installed, probably not much more. I also run the tests without anything else running. (I think fair given this machine is retired and on a pension)
so im not sure what to suggest really, this machine is 10 years old, 3 years old than yours, pretty much same processor, and a bit less memory... and given the age, Id assume the GPU is worst than yours as well.
(sorry, I can't say anything about windows performance, as I only run win10 on VMWare on my newer mac, so that performs well, but doesn't say much)
GPU on an ARM board, not tried with my PI2 , that apparently now has a GPU.... Id also wonder on the PI if memory starts becoming a potential issue... I will one day fire it up on my Pi2 for a laugh.
(but for proper usages, as Ive stated elsewhere, Im going to add a command line Axoloti, to start/compile patches )