Designer 3.5 performance reports

[geoffc]

Geoffrey Carman wrote:
> Biggest thing I am looking for in Designer 3.5 and future is better
> performance.
>
> I see a couple of areas:
> Startup time. (I am told since it is an Eclipse RCP app it should be
> faster. Yay!)

Lest it be said that all I ever do is *****, whinge, and complain, let
me be clear, I like to offer praise when I can!!!

I switched to 3.5 full time, as of yesterday and have spent probably
10-12 hours in it, working on a project already.

I can confirm that Startup is a LOT faster than the older Designer
builds, so definite kudos to the Designer team.

> Switching between tabs on large projects.

This was my big concern.

So to really test it, since I am a bit masochistic, I copied my 3.01
workspace, to a new location, and set Designer to use the 3.01 and
started converting projects.

I.e. This is probably one of the worst case scenarios. Keep all the old
crap, and about 15 projects, many with dozens (one with hundreds) of
drivers in them.

PS: If you are not aware, from the Project view, Disable projects that
not in use at the moment. It only takes about 3 seconds a project, and
they re-enable at about the same speed. So nice and quick. This does
seem to have some minor performance benefit.

So currently all my old, except 5 or so current projects are disabled.
(I found that just enabling the 150 driver project kicked me into the
700 Meg memory range on 3.01!!!)

So far I have NOT checked anything in to version control. When I went
too, Designer warned me to read the docs before proceeding, I guess
since the file format has changed, and no doubt will make a bajillion
SVN changes... RTFM, gotta find the time to do that...

Another performance tip is NOT to import all the notification templates,
and if you have the multi-language versions, but are not using them,
trash them, as every object in the Model Outline view costs you performance.

Thus with that baseline laid down, I seem to be experiencing better
performance so far!

I am currently working in a 2 driver project, trying to customize the AD
driver to use multi valued versions of DirXML-ADContext and
DirXML-ADAliasName which is NOT as simple or straightforward as you
might think!

So I have been walking through every rule in the driver, a LOT! Back
and forth.

Within that project, performance has been great.

I still have two projects open in the Model/Dev view for Prod and Dev
that have about 25 drivers in 4 trees and they have been performing
better than 3.01. Not perfect, in the two driver project, as I still
get odd freezes, but nothing as bad as 3.01 was on a regular basis.

And I am switching between the three, and opening closing rules, etc.
The other two bigger projects are still slow for opening new rules, but
better than in 3.01.

Overall I am quite pleased. (But I want more speed! Need more speed!)

One delay that I had been seeing in 3.01 that seemed sort of new,
towards the end, and I HAVE seen in 3.5 but to a lesser extent is when
doing a compare of one tree with say 10 drivers or so, and walking down
the differences, switching from the XML attr of one policy object to
another, to select Update eDir or Update Designer, there is this very
annoying lag.

Now this is AFTER network traffic of the compare, so I do not believe it
to be network related. It is almost like I have hit a CPU hog moment,
which is odd, since I do not recall seeing this in the past.

3.5 is doing it a little bit. Less so than 3.01, but this is about the
only major complaint otherwise, in comparison to 3.01!! :) I would love
for even the one-two second delays to go away, and for tab switching to
be as fast as Ctrl-Tab in Firefox, but in 3.01 it was a 5-10 second sort
of thing. In 3.5 it is more like 1-2, which is a great improvement, but
still work to be done!

So Designer guys (and gals) if you are reading this, many thanks to you,
for your hard work. Now get back to it, and more features and
performance soon please!!! :)

I have yet to have time to do anything with Provisioning, this is all
100% Policy Builder.

I still have a whole host of UI improvements I would like to see. A
number are in Bugzilla, and others are in the new RMS system. :)