Performance check?

[RafaŁ Buchner]

I'm about to face the following case:
I'm starting to work with people that still use RF 1.8.
From many apparent reasons, since I'm going to be their coder, I'm trying to talk them into using Robofont 3.2 or above. Unfortunately, they said that they faced some problems with performance while testing out RF 3.

To solve the problem, I asked them to do, what's following:

0. update the RF3 to the last stable version
1. I made sure that in the Preference Editor "warningWithFullStack" and "warningsLevel" are set to 1 and always. This way I was able to determine which scripts and plugins ran in the background are explicitly buggy
2. delete or update extensions, and scripts that don't work in RF3
3. if this didn't change the performance much, I asked them to make a backup copy of folders mentioned in 2 and to empty active folders. Then to copy, one-by-one, the scripts from the backup folder to the active directories. Whenever the script or plugin has been moved to the folder, I asked them to restart RF3 to check, if the performance has changed.
   I did it to determine which extension causing performance issues.

They say that this method helped a bit. Also, all of the co-workers updated their systems recently to Mojave. At least one of them says that this helped (I don't know if it could be even the reason).
In two weeks from now, I'm going to meet them and check their machines myself. Could any of you give me an advice, if there is any methodology/tools to check if the performance of RF3 is optimal? What should I look at/for?

I'm also going to determine what exactly they understand as a 'poor performance'. So far, I was able to figure out that the issue is with using Glyph Window when drawing/moving points: it is slow and laggy. The same with SpaceWindow. One of the co-workers, when I asked her to open the Preference Editor, said that even scrolling to the bottom of the editor was causing jamming.

I never faced issues like that, so I'm curious what would be the best way of solving problems like that.

Thanks for the help in advance

[gferreira]

hello @RafaŁ-Buchner,

this is a great summary and a very valuable test case. please let us know how it goes!

something I wish I knew when I was upgrading to RF3: you can use different folders for your RF3 and RF1 extensions. this allows you to start fresh in RF3 without messing up your current RF1 extensions setup. (the extensions folder can be configured in Preferences > Extensions)

another place to keep an eye for error messages and tracebacks is the log file. (use the keyboard shortcut ⌃ ⌘ ⌥ O to jump to it in Finder)

setting warningsLevel to always is good for detecting problems, but I would recommend setting it to ignore while working. (printing a lot of deprecation warnings to the Output Window might slow things down a bit)

ps. most extensions have been upgraded to RF3 by now, so switching to RF3 today is smoother than it was 1 year ago. (those who tried and gave up are encouraged to try again :)

[FosterType]

Hey mate,

Nothing to add except I'd be really interested to hear your results from this as I'm currently on 3.3 and High Sierra. It's pretty common I get really heavy lag on dragging guides and working with Glyph Construction. Even dragging points can be sub optimal at times. More so than I used to with 1.8.

D