Programming efficiency

Man, I can't help but wonder about the programming efficiency with L4. This is primarily still a text based program and I can't understand why the scrolling is so slow and sluggish compared with L3 or almost any other windows based program. And before you start dissing my computer, it's not that. My system is plenty strong enough to run this program. Somewhere in this program, something is eating up a LOT of CPU cycles. It's really baffling.

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Kevin Taylor

I too have had periodic issues with very sluggish scrolling in L4. In my case I have a high performance gaming laptop with plenty of RAM, 2 7200 RPM SATA drives running at 3.0 Gb/sec transfer speeds and a class 1 video card. My laptop runs the most taxing video games without breaking a sweat so I also know it is not my machine.

I will continue to be patient while the Logos team continues to optimize this already amazing new power tool, but even I get a little miffed at tims with the slow scrolling. Don't feel alone and don't get discouraged, I'm sure we will see improvements soon.

Doug

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/53556#Comment_53556

Thanks Kevin. I'm not giving up or anything. I'm really starting to find some great benefits of using L4 now and I love the new features. It's just mind blowing how a text based resource can be so demanding. I know that while doing complex searches it's going to need a lot of CPU power. But just for reading, it shouldn't take that much power to scroll the screen. Somehow, somewhere, someone needs to recheck the code and find out where this went wrong. What feature was added that slowed things down so much? Was it worth it? Is there a better way to do it? Is Hyperthreading being utilized? These are just questions that run through my mind.

Kevin Taylor

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/53570#Comment_53570

You are not alone my brother, I am continually blown away by L4 and it's wonderful benefits yet admittedly one night last week I think I almost lost it due to lag in scroll. Of course this was in the middle of a GREAT study session LOL. I had to shut it down and end my session for the night, thank God for the ability to sync your session exactly where it was.

Glad to see that you are enjoying L4 despite its rough edges.... Imagine how much sweeter it will be when it gets the full polish job that is sure to come soon.

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/53570#Comment_53570

4.0a has the option to remove the "wear" marks (bookmarks/search results) from the scroll bar and my laptop (in Win 7 RC) scrolls more smoothly as a result.

It is still in Beta test!

Proper optimisations are coming!

Rich DeRuiter

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/53570#Comment_53570

What feature was added that slowed things down so much? Was it worth it? Is there a better way to do it? Is Hyperthreading being utilized? These are just questions that run through my mind.

Let me try to answer these as someone who was on the original Beta program and has been watching these discussions, especially performance issues. (You've probably seen me respond to these issues before.)

What slowed things down? I'm convinced that the WPF programing environment is creating a GUI display that requires more CPU and graphical processing power than your average program. Doing a brief study of WPF on the internet confirms that for me. This GUI is a graphically rich environment, as you can see by the shading and color subtlety. But even font rendering is different in WPF than in a standard Windows program. there are probably some code optimization that will help with some (many? most?) of these issues, but at it's most optimal WPF is going to be more demanding on hardware than programs created in previous programing environments.

Was it worth it? Since I'm not a programmer, I can't say that choosing WPF over other options was the best possible choice. But sticking with the IE dependent system of Libronix certainly was not an option. I would guess that Logos went with WPF in part because of it's ability to display of media files: images, music, audio, eventually video. But also coloring the text for visual filters, highlighting and maybe a few goodies we haven't heard about yet. Not many major companies have chosen WPF as a programming environment, because it does mean a complete program rewrite. But Logos was ready for that, and knew it had to do it.

Is there a better way to do it? You'll have to ask somebody who knows what it takes to put together a program like Logos4.

Is hyperthreading being utilized? Yes. I had asked the same question, and doubted that L4 could take advantage of multi-threading. I was told explicitly that it does.

I've heard you speak about L4 as primarily a text based resource. If that were all Logos4 was, then it has major issues. But it's not. First, it's an environment for analyzing complex textual issues in both textual and graphical ways. It's also multi-lingual, interactive (annotatable, highlightable, click-linkable, etc), hypertexted, graphical, analytically searchable (word, phrase, grammar, relational, etc.) and internet linkable. There's a lot of programming that requires far more than the mere display of text. Look here for the list of things that L4 does that L3 didn't, or that L4 does better than L3 did: http://www.logos.com/4/newfeatures

BTW, I'm using Beta4 of 4.0a and there are some speed improvements coming. It probably won't solve all the issues everyone is having, but it does seem a bit better than SR-7 in some things.

SteveF

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/53570#Comment_53570

someone needs to recheck the code and find out where this went wrong.
What feature was added that slowed things down so much? Was it worth
it? Is there a better way to do it? Is Hyperthreading being
utilized? These are just questions that run through my mind.

I share your pain. These concerns have existed since beta. BUT they do NOT appear to be consistent across the board. Some who post here have "slower" machines which appear to work just fine, while others with "screaming fast" machines cry out in agony at the slow and or "jumpy" scroll.

Bob (and other staffers who reply here) tell us that "yes", L4 was designed to benefit from hyper-linking and multiple cores.

After running this since the beginning of beta, I almost don't care if anything else is ever improved, if ONLY they could (consistently) speed up "scrolling."

My one core tower must only have 1 or 2 resources open. The 2 core laptop is a little better...but...

(You might try putting any of the "follow" type tools into a separate floating window to get them away from the resource you are working in?)

One engineer-type on these threads said that such (final) optimizing should not be done until all the other bugs and upgrades had been completed. I hope not, but I am not qualified to even speculate.

A wonderful program with some amazing resources, but sometimes so frustrating when you could almost turn the actual pages faster by hand.

Regards

Steve

Doug

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/53597#Comment_53597

What slowed things down? I'm convinced that the WPF programing environment is creating a GUI display that requires more CPU and graphical processing power than your average program. Doing a brief study of WPF on the internet confirms that for me. This GUI is a graphically rich environment, as you can see by the shading and color subtlety. But even font rendering is different in WPF than in a standard Windows program. there are probably some code optimization that will help with some (many? most?) of these issues, but at it's most optimal WPF is going to be more demanding on hardware than programs created in previous programing environments.

Thanks for the reply Richard. You are very knowledgable about Logos, having been there from the beginning. I am a CIS major at EKU in Richmond, KY. I graduate in May and man I am looking forward to being finished. Anyway, I do some programming and the latest thing I'm tackling is WPF/Silverlight with Visual Studio Professional 2008 and Microsoft Blend 3. WPF is actually a very fast platform. A subset of it (Silverlight) is used as a type of Java replacement for Internet applications. One of the beauties of it is that once the platform is installed on a user's machine (Silverlight), you can then just transfer text commands over the Internet to make Silverlight/WPF do some amazing things. Blend lets you do this with an XML dirivative called XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language). It's really a cutting edge (not so much bleeding edge now) technology.

Anyway, I said all of that to say that I don't really think that we can blame WPF for this. Now, I don't know it all and I could be wrong but so far, the programs I've written (none so grand as L4) don't seem to pull the CPU down that much. I think it was Kevin above that mentioned that even very graphics intensive games are not affecting our computers the way L4 is.

I've heard you speak about L4 as primarily a text based resource. If that were all Logos4 was, then it has major issues. But it's not. First, it's an environment for analyzing complex textual issues in both textual and graphical ways. It's also multi-lingual, interactive (annotatable, highlightable, click-linkable, etc), hypertexted, graphical, analytically searchable (word, phrase, grammar, relational, etc.) and internet linkable. There's a lot of programming that requires far more than the mere display of text. Look here for the list of things that L4 does that L3 didn't, or that L4 does better than L3 did: http://www.logos.com/4/newfeatures

Yes, I realize that L4 is very much more than just an ebook reader. Thank God for that. Also, it does more than L3 . . . but not that much more. L3 was limited by IE. Working with HTML limitations is difficult without addins like Java and Silverlight and even that is not going to be very useful for L4. I'm still just kind of baffled at what it is about this program that pulls that many CPU cycles. But hey, I'm all in and I'm praying for the Logos team because I really believe in what they do. The Word of God is our anchor. Knowing it to the fullest I possibly can is important to me and L4 is helping me do that. Praise God for them. I'm mostly just thinking out loud (well maybe typing out loud) about what could help or lead the Logos team to a solution.

By the way, just in case I haven't made this clear to the Logos team: I really would like to have use of the scroll option on my touchpad. Let's get that fixed! Can we?

Rich DeRuiter

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/53696#Comment_53696

By the way, just in case I haven't made this clear to the Logos team: I really would like to have use of the scroll option on my touchpad.

I'm sure you know much more about WPF than I do. I'm just reporting on what I've read here and elsewhere. I'm sure a lot of companies are watching Logos implement WPF as a major application, wondering if it's worth it. I wouldn't be surprised to find an MS employee or two taking L4 for a test spin and putting it through the paces.

L4 is also making use of .NET I'm assuming the performance issues have to do with WPF, since it's less used than .NET but either could be at fault, I suppose.

As far as the touchpad issue goes. I just read in another thread that this is a WPF issue that MS has scheduled to be fixed around Mid 2010. Sorry about that. Apparently WPF interprets the touchpad input as mouse input and disrupts the call for scrolling. Bad design.

Terry Poperszky

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/53699#Comment_53699

How do I to say this in Love? I am the senior system administrator for a mid sized IT department responsible for the development of a an ERP that is the heart of our company. Am I a programmer? Nope, I have heard it said that programmers are all mildly autistic, and sysadmins are ADD, my work experience tells me that true. But I do work in close concert with the programmers, and I have watched over the last 5 years as they have taken a vision that our CIO had and turned it into reality. The initial product was a sad shadow of what we have released just this week. I have watched the meetings, I have watched the failures and I have watched the successes. I have watched bringing developers on fresh out of school and the seasoned programmers having to train them in how the real world operates. I have watched all this and watched how the Company management has balanced what we wanted to do, against what is financially feasible.

I see much of the same interaction on this forum and I know from personal experience what is happening behind the scenes in the programmers areas. Guys, it isn't perfect. It isn't how you would have done it. If you are a programmer looking for a job, send them your resume. If you a not, that utilize the forum to point them in the ways that you think they need to go. But stop the complaining. I have used Logos products since 1996 when I conned them into giving me a copy in return for a review in our state Baptist newspaper. L4 is not perfect, L4 for Mac is even farther away. But based on what I am seeing, they (and the community that goes with it) are better than anything else I have seen.

Sorry guys if I stepped over the line.

Doug

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/53699#Comment_53699

I guess the Logos team maybe has a little more sympathy for Microsoft and the problems in dealing with the complexities of such a massive project. I'm sure Microsoft gets burried in that at times. And no, I'm not saying for sure that WPF isn't the issue. I definitely don't know all there is to know about it. It's more likely WPF than .NET. At any rate, thanks again for the disucussion and for sharing your knowledge. It's much appreciated.

Doug

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/53718#Comment_53718

Yeah, I think you may have missed the heart of the discussion. I have also used Logos since about 1997 when I bought the Nelson Electronic Bible Reference Library. I love this product. This is not complaining. I'm just thinking out loud. Maybe through something one of us writes in these forums, a lightbulb will come on in the mind of one of the programmers on this project. Being a light programmer myself, I have the utmost respect and sympathy for these guys. Sorry if it seems like I'm complaining. Really, I'm just trying to help. That's one of the drawbacks of this communication channel. You can't see the body language and sometimes it comes across wrong. [:D]

Terry Poperszky

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/53722#Comment_53722

Really, I'm just trying to help. That's one of the drawbacks of this communication channel. You can't see the body language and sometimes it comes across wrong.

Douglas, that is why I rewrote my post about 5 different times, trying to choose the correct words. Plus I have a feeling my response wasn't simply directed at this string, but at a lot of posts that I have been reading today. Working in a development environment, I am extremely protective of my programmers (even when they are idiots) because I know that constraints that are imposed on them. I manage a team of system admins and I always tell them our job is to give the best technical information that we can, then the people on the top floor will for the most part ignore that, and come to a business decision based on things that we have no control over. The forum gives us unparalleled access to the Logos programming team sometimes I think we forget that we aren't their bosses (except in a lose, capitalistic sense).

Doug

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/53723#Comment_53723

Hey, no problem Terry. I'd love to be on the programming team for Logos. If I lived near Bellingham, I'd be beating their doors down every day looking for a job. I love programming and I love Logos. What a combination for a job. Anyway, all the best to you.