PulpFiction Performance
Posted May 27th, 2004 @ 10:57am by Erik J. Barzeski
What is Freshly Squeezed Software's new favorite application? It's one called "Spin Control!"
Spin Control is an application that helps you identify why an application might display the spinning rainbow wait cursor. It automatically samples any application which appears unresponsive to the Window Server.
Spin Control comes with Xcode 1.2 and will be put to use a great deal over the next few weeks. We're aware of some performance issues in PulpFiction 1.0. It is one of our top priorities for PulpFiction 1.0.1 (and 1.0.2, and so on). We may not fix every speed bump in 1.0.1, but with Spin Control, finding some of the tougher problems will be easier.
PulpFiction 1.0.1, by the way, will fix or add about 60 unique things, 57 of which most people might never see. We're working hard. You'll hear more in early June.
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Posted 27 May 2004 at 11:55am #
Incidentally, while a lot of the "slowdown" in 1.0 is because we were using less than optimal techniques, a good bit of it is due to the fact that we used "shoot for the moon" techniques.
For example, some feeds don't include entry titles. We had a few choices here, but we chose to use Apple's "summarize" features to summarize the entry body and get a title. This is rather slow, and as we've found out, typically doesn't result in very good titles anyway.
In 1.0.1, we're backing off on that to simply use the first five or six words as the title. 🙂
Posted 27 May 2004 at 12:17pm #
Or perhaps you could look for a period or return within the first N words?
Posted 27 May 2004 at 12:58pm #
I'd appreciate you reducing the size of text on the panel that lists the number of unread items, the green one on the dock icon. It would be great if you could reduce it to the same size and font style that Apple uses for their Mail app.
I know this seems trivial and it doesn't effect the performance of the application but the PulpFiction icon dominates my dock now.
Posted 27 May 2004 at 1:06pm #
Sean, you've emailed us on this and we still feel that the badge is almost exactly the same size as that used by Mail.
Also, the size of the badge, as you suggest, has nothing to do with performance.
Posted 27 May 2004 at 1:46pm #
Is there anywhere we can download Spin Control? Or is this just a program that FSS is using to isolate slow downs in house?
Posted 27 May 2004 at 2:32pm #
Spin Control comes with Apple's Developer Tools.
Posted 27 May 2004 at 2:53pm #
It's part of CHUD.
Posted 27 May 2004 at 5:19pm #
It's good to read that you recognize performance problems in PF 1.0; I was afraid that it was just me and my 400MHz Pismo.
I've been using PF for about 10 days now, and I've been torn between loving it for its features and hating it for its slowness. Before reading this blog post, I was seriously considering chucking it in the Trash at the end of the eval period and chalking it up to experience. Knowing that you're working on the performance, I might just keep it now. 🙂
Posted 27 May 2004 at 5:50pm #
Craig, we'll always be working on performance!
Posted 28 May 2004 at 12:22am #
"We had a few choices here, but we chose to use Apple's "summarize" features to summarize the entry body and get a title."
Really? For me, it "summarised" (ie. copied) the first 10 lines, stripped it of \n's and used that.
1/2 of the post was just title, I thought that the poster was just an idiot using the subject box for the content, until I looked at the feed.
Posted 28 May 2004 at 7:22am #
Well, Apple's summarize feature wasn't really designed to make a headline out of two short paragraphs of text...
Posted 28 May 2004 at 6:45pm #
Thanks everyone for answering my question. Stupid of me.