Yeah I was joking too, well I was semi serious more like it. Of course I care about performance, but I am willing to be forgiving with Pharo , everything has its own issues and doing graphics with Pharo beats doing graphics with C/C++ anyday. Debugging C++ code kills my inner child.

Yes I think I will be fine, we were just discussing with Stephan on slack about slow down he found with Checkboxmorph he also thought that the reference of the forms (on ,off, pressed , depressed)�� was slow for some reason but I found out that it was the initialisation of the checkboxmoprh that it was much slower , reference the morphs gave me 2 million request per second. So referencing the forms is blazing fast.

So it looks like the slow down is mainly creating the form, as soon as creating the form Morphic is very fast. So its not that bad and I am sure I will be fine. But I promise to keep digging. Morphic has this hot and cold attitude , that when you expect it to be slow is blazzing fast and when you expect it to be fast its hog slow. I think also that most likely PNGReader could be optimised to be faster, but for now thats outside my area of expertise.

On Sun, Nov 22, 2015 at 7:16 PM Tudor Girba <tudor@tudorgirba.com> wrote:
Hi,

I was making a joke given the way the discussion turned out:
- you said that something was slow
- then Stef asked you if you are caching the forms instead of PNGs
- then you said you do not
- then Stef asked you why not
- then you said that you were not focused on making things fast

Anyway, maybe it was funny just for me :).

Morph is rather slow indeed, but displaying a handful of PNGs should not kill it either. But, it seems you narrowed the problem down. In my little snippet, I provided a cache. By the look of it, I think that should address that problem. Could you let us know if this works out for you?

Cheers,
Doru


> On Nov 22, 2015, at 4:24 PM, Dimitris Chloupis <kilon.alios@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I realize you trying to help, and thank you very much. Nothing I have done would be possible without your help.�� But also you must realize I am not you and not as familiar with Pharo as you are. Also when I say that I do something that does not mean I ignore your advice. At the moment I was not aware of the problem , now that I am aware I have profiled it , I have isolated the exact method (is in the PNGReader class) and I have already a fix in mind, I even created an issue not to forget about it
>
> https://github.com/kilon/ChronosManager/issues/15
>
> all these have happened way before your first replied to me.
>
> I am very relaxed, as a matter of fact I am quite happy with my pharo experience so far. I was never naive enough to expect Morphic to be fast, there is a reason why graphics code is predominately coded in C/C++ and why I have been an active supporter of SDL graphics support for Pharo in the past.
>
> I am willing to learn but those things take time. And my reply was a bit on the comic side if that has not been obvious so far ;)
>
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 22, 2015 at 5:13 PM stepharo <stepharo@free.fr> wrote:
> You should relax a bit.
> We were trying to help.
> Morphic is slow and strange and we are working on new generation.
> Now profile a bit your application to see what you are doing may be you are redrawing too much or triggering something that is costly.
> So it depends what you are doing. the step method of all the morphs is invoked every refresh cycle so.
>
> Stef
>
>
>> really you ask me why I am complaining that�� loading a form from a 2kb png image, AND I REPEAT , 2KB IMAGE ,for each morphic step�� brings a whole GUI system to its knees with 5 instances ?
>>
>> I complain, which I did not complain by the way but your post inspires me to complain a lot now, because tectonic plates find Pharo handling of images so slow they decided to go out for coffee.
>>
>> I also complain because I live in 2015 where my main open source app , blender can handle loading a 300 mb blend file in under a second. And I consider Blender one of the least performant�� 3d apps out there. Thats a file more 100.000 times larger than the pathetic small png i am loading during stepping.
>>
>> And on top of that , is also my first try at creating something based on png images in pharo and I am slapped in the face for daring to deliver code that is not right. Sorry but you guys make no sense.
>>
>>
>> This is how I store pngs in a method --> http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~peteruhnak/IconFactory
>>
>> But I probably will abandon that solution too and rely on loading external files directly since I dont like overcrowding my method sources with image data. If that make things slower , so be it, I will have to live with the idea that Pharo is not fast and try to work on what I can do with it. I dont mind limitations, I do mind being told that I complain when I clearly dont.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Nov 22, 2015 at 4:37 PM Tudor Girba <tudor@tudorgirba.com> wrote:
>> Then why do you ���complain" about the code being slow? :)
>>
>> Seriously, how do you store the PNG file in the method? Here is an example of how to store the form of a PNG:
>>
>> form := PNGReadWriter formFromFileNamed: aPngFile.
>> iconName := aPngFile basenameWithoutExtension.
>> methodSource :=
>>�� �� �� �� ��iconName , Character cr asString ,
>>�� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� ��'^ self icons
>>�� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� ��at: #', iconName,
>>�� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� ��'ifAbsentPut: [',
>>�� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� ��form storeString,
>>�� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� ��']'.
>> targetClass class compile: methodSource classified: ���icons���.
>>
>> This will compile the picture in a ���iconName��� method in a ���targetClass���. The code also relies on an ���icons��� getter in the ���targetClass��� that should cache these forms. Like this, you only load the form once.
>>
>> Is this enough for you?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Doru
>>
>>
>> > On Nov 22, 2015, at 2:56 PM, Dimitris Chloupis <kilon.alios@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > because making something work for me comes way before making something work fast.
>> >
>> > On Sun, Nov 22, 2015 at 3:50 PM stepharo <stepharo@free.fr> wrote:
>> > But why don't you manipulate Forms instead of PNGs. Converting from PNGs to Forms should be done only once.
>> >
>> > Stef
>> >
>> > Le 22/11/15 11:53, Dimitris Chloupis a ��crit :
>> >> here is the tricky part , I am willing to bet that the slow down happens because of the stepping of the seconds indicator.
>> >>
>> >> The one thing I forgot to mention is that I dont load my images from external files, the images are already converted to method sources , strings , with Peter's IconFactory library. Still the PNGReader class tries to convert those string streams to forms and is where most of the time is consumed. The reason I chose this approach was in hope of a speed up so pharo does not waste time opening and closing files.
>> >>
>> >> In the stepping of the seconds indicator I recreate the form in each step , depending on the seconds. I could optomise that part by having all images of the animation loaded into seperate forms during initialisation and just use the reference of the correct form during stepping that should speed things up a lot.
>> >>
>> >> Overall 170ms for opening that GUI is not so bad for a dynamic GC language. Taking into account that this is mostly pharo code , unlike python that it would be using a C lib to speed things up. I am a happy Morphic customer :)
>> >>
>> >> On Sun, Nov 22, 2015 at 12:39 PM Thierry Goubier <thierry.goubier@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >> Le 22/11/2015 11:27, Dimitris Chloupis a ��crit :
>> >> > tried with ChronosManager
>> >> >
>> >> > [ ChronosManager open ] bench
>> >> >
>> >> > 5.6 per second
>> >> >
>> >> > it opened around 30 instances and Morphic was crawling.
>> >> >
>> >> > I profiled it and it reports that it spends a total 170ms which is
>> >> > consistent with bench. Around 50ms is spent only for loading the image
>> >> > of the secondary panel and from what I have seen loading the images and
>> >> > the font accounts around 90% of the time spent and then rest 10% is
>> >> > actually morphic + logic.
>> >>
>> >> If I understand you well, what you have is:
>> >>
>> >> - ChronosManager takes 170ms to open, including external resources
>> >> loading time (which is SSD/HD dependent).
>> >>
>> >> - The whole world performance degrades with many ChronosManager
>> >> instances loaded? (Moving one around probably forces others to refresh
>> >> as well).
>> >>
>> >> What could be nice is to profile rendering time as well (but, if your
>> >> first render time is included in the 10% of 170ms you quote, then it is
>> >> probably fine).
>> >>
>> >> Would you like to try benchmarking rendering one ChronosManager instance
>> >> when you have 30 instances opened / only one instance opened?
>> >>
>> >> > So from the looks of it , it looks like Morphic does not perform well
>> >> > with loaded images and external files.
>> >>
>> >> This is a clear win if you cache those (i.e. have a LRU cache holding
>> >> forms and fonts, filled upon first load, reused over subsequent loads).
>> >>
>> >> Thierry
>> >>
>> >> >
>> >> >
>> >> > On Sun, Nov 22, 2015 at 11:34 AM Thierry Goubier
>> >> > <thierry.goubier@gmail.com <mailto:thierry.goubier@gmail.com>> wrote:
>> >> >
>> >> >�� �� ��Hi all,
>> >> >
>> >> >�� �� ��I would like to ask you, all of you, something significant when doing
>> >> >�� �� ��GUI coding:
>> >> >
>> >> >�� �� �� �� �� �� �� Pay attention to performance!
>> >> >
>> >> >�� �� ��With the current state of our technology (Morphic, Bloc, whatever comes
>> >> >�� �� ��next) your target should be one hundred milliseconds (100 ms), for
>> >> >�� �� ��opening / redisplaying the widget.
>> >> >
>> >> >�� �� ��Why?
>> >> >
>> >> >�� �� ��- Because, in 10ms, Morphic can open and layout dozens of Morphs on a
>> >> >�� �� ��low-end machine (1.4GHz Celeron).
>> >> >
>> >> >�� �� ��- Because most of you work on 3GHz+ i7 Macbook Pro (so, at 10x the cpu
>> >> >�� �� ��performance of that said Celeron).
>> >> >
>> >> >�� �� ��- Because you are not to reproduce the past: that your current tools are
>> >> >�� �� ��slow is no excuse.
>> >> >
>> >> >�� �� ��- Because you now have well designed core widgets (FT) that behaves in
>> >> >�� �� ��O(1) and opens fully loaded in 10's of milliseconds
>> >> >
>> >> >�� �� ��So, profile and clean your code! Eliminate unneeded caches! Clean your
>> >> >�� �� ��architectures! Avoid or mark slow code and bottlenecks!
>> >> >
>> >> >�� �� ��And bring numbers when you want to criticize the performance of a
>> >> >�� �� ��subsystem...
>> >> >
>> >> >�� �� ��Thierry
>> >> >
>> >>
>> >>
>> >
>>
>> --
>> www.tudorgirba.com
>>
>> "Every now and then stop and ask yourself if the war you're fighting is the right one."
>>
>>
>>
>>
>

--
www.tudorgirba.com

"Presenting is storytelling."