On Mar 19, 2012, at 6:09 PM, Eliot Miranda wrote:

On Sun, Mar 18, 2012 at 4:57 AM, Stefan Marr <smalltalk@stefan-marr.de> wrote: Hi:

When trying to debug a Pharo image with a VM that is heavily instrumented with assertions and runs without any compiler optimizations turned on, it is crawlingly slow. (The good old MVC based image is blazingly fast in comparison)

Are there any tricks to reduce/disable all the possibly fancy things like transparency, code completion, syntax highlighting easily?

I already disable the code completion, and syntax highlighting. I also switched off things like animations, rounded corners, and switched to the Standard Squeak theme.

Still, non of these cosmetic changes gave me the noticeable performance gain I had hoped for.

Is there anything else I could try to reduce the amount of work the image is doing? It blinks the cursor in a text field in the speed I would expect. But as soon as I start typing, or try to interact with a window, it feels like I can go for a walk before the image is done.

I noticed some absurd preference checking in standard images a while back, but turning this off made no noticeable different in optimized Cog. Look for uses of Preferences subPixelRenderFonts, e.g. installStrikeFont:foregroundColor:backgroundColor:. There's a non-local return in the default path on preference access. So not having subPixelRenderFonts a defined preference method creates lots on noise when doing VM debugging.

in Pharo Preferences are not anymore... #subPixelRenderFonts is send to StrikeFont and just returns true (the default of the Preference). I think the idea was to add a Setting later if someone requests it... and nobody ever did. So maybe we can simplify that method a bit. Marcus -- Marcus Denker -- http://marcusdenker.de