[plt-scheme] Appalling performance of DrScheme on Windows

My experience has been like Matthias's.  I do most of my development on my
laptop running Windows XP (and on Win2K on my laptop before this one).  I
have been developing the science and simulation collections, both of which
are multi-thousand line collections, and running simulations, which tend to
rather computation or continuation intensive (or both), without the problems
you are having.  This is true from v209 up to v350.

I also regularly test my software on my wife's 256MB laptop to make sure it
runs on 'smaller' configurations.  The only problems I have had was with
downloading and installing collections with very large files (pdf files of
the science or simulation collection reference manuals), which did show some
of the symptoms you mention.  But that was just when attempting the download
- which would ultimately fail.

I know this sound like a testimonial rather than a serious answer to your
concern, but I have been quite happy with the performance of the system -
particularly with the recently added JIT and continuation changes.

But, maybe the guys with more actual knowledge of the innards of the system
can offer some suggestions.

Doug


-----Original Message-----
From: plt-scheme-bounces at list.cs.brown.edu on behalf of Matthias Felleisen
Sent: Mon 6/19/2006 4:50 PM
To: wooks wooks
Cc: plt-scheme at list.cs.brown.edu
Subject: Re: [plt-scheme] Appalling performance of DrScheme on Windows
 
This sounds indeed like an appalling response time and it makes me 
wonder why some 10,000 people are using DrScheme on Windows. Now I am 
using DrScheme on Windows XP only via Virtual PC on a Mac OS X laptop 
and it runs very nicely there. On my Mac, I am running "large" programs 
(up to 5,000 lines, threaded) in DrScheme, leave the environment open 
for days and weeks at a time, and haver very few problems of this kind.

But before we bash Microsoft one more time on this list, let's 
investigate your report in some detail. We don't want to blame them for 
nothing, right?

1. What kind of machine do you own? CPU speed and memory are two things 
we'd really like to know.

2. Which PLT Scheme implementation are you running? 350? 103p1? 
Anything in between?

2a. Have you modified your PLT Scheme installation in any form or 
manner?

3. What kind of programs do you run? Are they text-book exercises? 
Dynamic flow equations?

Once we have that information we will figure out how to get you to use 
this thing in an acceptable manner.

Thanks for the report -- Matthias



On Jun 19, 2006, at 6:31 PM, wooks wooks wrote:

>
> I am running DrScheme on Windows XP and I regularly experience abysmal 
> response time running DrScheme.
>
> Usually its starts off ok but the longer its left running the worse 
> the response time gets (especially if you leave a session idle for a 
> long time). It is not uncommon for me to manage only 4 interactions in 
> an hour because DrScheme just hangs for ages before it will accept 
> input.
>
> Previously I had the same problem running under Win2k. I thought it 
> would go away when I bought a new machine last year runnnig windows XP 
> but its just as bad.
>
> It is pretty much impossible to use the environment with this sort of 
> response time.
>
>
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