[racket-dev] Large preferences file and performance

This would not have helped us with the bug Casey found, I don't think.

Robby

On Thursday, December 2, 2010, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> 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!
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