Custom workspace = slow HISE

[d.healey]

Did HISE load up at normal speed? That's where I'm noticing the most slowness.

[Dan Korneff]

@d-healey I didn't notice a difference.

[d.healey]

@dustbro Hmm, must be something else with my config then. Thanks for testing it, enjoy your new custom workspace :p

[Christoph Hart]

Do you have any markdown panels in your layout? Because they will initiate a "hidden" HISE instance for the dynamic help things.

[d.healey]

@Christoph-Hart I don't have one in the custom workspace but I do have a markdown editor tab in the scripting workspace. I've just removed this and relaunched HISE and the slow startup issue was still there.

I tested renaming my editorData.json and HISE opened up (with default layout) and normal speed.

Unrelated, but I also noticed that load JSON is greyed out when you right click on the top level of the custom workspace

[Christoph Hart]

Has the current project a lot of sample maps / midi files? They are initialised on startup so it might be the reason if you are working on a big project (Percx as about 1200 samplemaps and Midifiles so it takes 3-5 seconds if I start HISE with the percx project).

[d.healey]

New empty project here, 8 - 10 seconds to open. Maybe a GNU/Linux only issue?

[d.healey]

I just tested on Windows and no problem there so I think it's specific to my OS and possibly to my general setup. I'll try on my other GNU/Linux system.

[d.healey]

Definitely seems to be OS specific, I just tested on Linux Mint and had the same issue as my main Debian system.

[d.healey]

Just tested on MacOS, works fine...

[Christoph Hart]

Try compiling the plugin version of HISE and then load it in a DAW and close reopen the window. If the lag is also happening there you know it's something related to the UI.

[d.healey]

@Christoph-Hart Good thinking, I'll do that now

[d.healey]

The plugin version doesn't seem to read from the same editorData file as the standalone version. Each time I open it it's reset to the default layout, even if I make changes to the layout in the plugin.

[d.healey]

@Christoph-Hart I've narrowed it down. When I remove the API browser from my custom workspace everything works normally.

[d.healey]

I'm digging up this thread again. I posted another thread recently where I mentioned HISE was laggy and I thought it might be down to Alder Lakes E/P cores. But I disabled all the P cores and it didn't make a difference.

So then I started wondering if it was the issue in this thread and it was caused by the API browser now being present in the sidebar. So I commented out the source code where that API browser is added, and bullseye, HISE opens instantly. It also closes instantly now too, I never noticed that was lagging also.

So @Christoph-Hart when you have a moment, please see if you can find out why the presence of the API browser causes HISE be super laggy on Linux.

[d.healey]

I've looked into this further and the issue is related to the help text generation. If I comment out this line, HISE loads up quickly (but obviously I get no help text).

Could this data be cached so it doesn't have to recreated everytime HISE is opened?

[d.healey]

@Christoph-Hart Got any ideas about this?

[Christoph Hart]

@d-healey Hmm, this is already "cached" in the sense that it just parses a compressed value tree containing the docs and creates a C++ object containing the formatting which shouldn't take too long.

Can you investigate further? Maybe it's time for you to learn how to use a profiler to find hotspots - this should give you an exact call stack of the heaviest calls including where it spends the most time so we can pinpoint it down to the font hinting algorithm (my guess here). I think the main one in Linux is valgrind but I've never used it and I can imagine there is some Linux-style extra nerd layer applied to its workflow :)

EDIT: This looks like the tools I'm using on Windows / macOS and allows you to attach the profiler to a running HISE build, so it might be easier to get running.

[d.healey]

@Christoph-Hart Thanks, I'll take a look and report back

[d.healey]

Not exactly sure what I'm looking for but this stuff is eating some CPU when the API thingy isn't commented out.