AD is bogging down

[Gear maker]

I'm hoping you can help me figure out why my drawing reacts so slowly.  It really bogs down AD.  I'm emailing the drawing to you.

 

The drawing is not all that big or complex.  I have the Apple Activity Monitor (AM) open to just see what is happening.  I'm in Separated mode to make it easier to also see the AM.  Doesn't seem to matter which mode or which tool is active.

 

I open the drawing, and let it sit for a minute.  Then zoom in to about 300%, it takes 30 seconds just to properly display the full screen.

 

Then select a layer.  Then select a different layer.  The spinning beach ball displays for a good minute.  The AM says "AD is not responding" and is showing just short of 200% CPU usage.  Not sure how Apple calculates over 100%, but...

 

Sometimes if I don't do anything it repeats the above all by itself.

 

If I step through the layers, just clicking on them.  I again get the spinning beachball after 2 or 3 layers.  AM says AD is not responding.  200% CPU usage. etc.

 

I pan and it takes another 30 seconds to display the screen properly.

 

A couple of the layers are compound, I have tried separating curves into separate layers.  No real change.

 

It's really hard to work on a drawing with all the delays.  I have had this problem with a few drawings, but this one seems to be the worst.  The drawings are all vector.

 

What can I do to improve response?

 

I am using beta 1.1.2.23308, but tried other betas and the results were the same.  27" iMac late 2009, Yosemite 10.10.1

 

I appreciate your help.

[MattP]

Have you sent this file to us? I can't seem to see it... :(  You could send it to me directly if you like? My email is mpriestley at seriflabs dot com

[Gear maker]

I resent it to your email.  Mike Fels (me) will be the sender.

 

Thanks for looking at this.

 

Mike

[MattP]

Thanks for that, Mike :)  I received the file and had a quick look... The problem you're seeing is simply down to the layer effects taking a long time to render... but I wouldn't expect it to be blocking your input in the same way that it appears to be doing - it should carry on regardless, so I'll try to take a better look at it and see what we can come up with. Thanks! :)

Matt

[Gear maker]

Thanks Matt.  FYI I turned off the 3D fx on all layers and the all the delays dropped to about a quarter what they were.  Still had the beachball, just for shorter times.

[Gear maker]

Turned off the single Bevel/Emboss and the rest of the delays went away.  That really makes the 3D and the Bevel/Emboss pretty unusable.  Frustration.

[MattP]

They are expensive operations to call at draw-time, particularly when they result in something fairly large on the screen... However, the real problem is that you shouldn't be getting the delays that you're getting - it shouldn't matter if it takes a while to draw them if it doesn't get in your way while it's getting on with drawing them. I can look at what's causing the delays and make sure they're kept to a minimum and I think that will improve things a lot. The other alternative is to cache the results of effects drawing but that is a false economy because (while it makes things draw faster) it starts to use up memory and is always drawn at the wrong size so will never look quite right - so is something we don't want to do.

[Gear maker]

Matt, thanks again.  Anything I can do to help let me know.