[racket-dev] Large preferences file and performance

20 minutes ago, Casey Klein wrote:
> I just pushed a fix for a bug that made DrRacket extremely sluggish
> on my laptop. Most everything was slow, but typing in the find and
> replace fields was particularly bad -- each character would take
> about a second to appear on screen.
> 
> The problem turned out to be that my framework preferences file was
> enormous, a problem since DrRacket saves your preferences very
> frequently. In particular, it saved them on each keystroke in the
> find and replace fields. (But no more. See http://bit.ly/eQmhOH)
> [...]

Something that I have said in the past a few times: IMO, it would be
better to have an indirection layer when writing the preferences --
most of the "transient" changes (like ones that happen after every
keystroke or a result of moving or resizing the windows) could go
through with a timer so that there are no such frequent writes,
instead, they'd be lumped in less frequent writes.  Non-transient
changes (eg, changing preferences) could still be done immediately, so
there's no consistency issues with such changes.

IIRC, Robby argued against this since he was worried about things not
getting written -- I think that splitting things to these two kinds of
changes would make this a non-issue -- for example, if DrRacket
crashes while you're moving a window you won't care about losing the
last changes.  I think that another issue was the level that this is
done -- and since the framework has an indirection anyway, it would be
natural to do this at that level rather than in the lower one.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!