[antlr-interest] ANTLRWorks editor slow down

[Jim Idle]

Ter,

That performance/reference leak checker that we were given licenses for as opensource dudes is really bloody good. Paste in a nice big grammar and keep generating code and editing. You should find the issues pretty quickly with that. It integrates really well with Netbeans so I assume it also integrates well with your IDE too.

Jim

> -----Original Message-----
> From: antlr-interest-bounces at antlr.org [mailto:antlr-interest-
> bounces at antlr.org] On Behalf Of William B. Clodius
> Sent: Monday, February 01, 2010 6:37 PM
> To: antlr-interest interest
> Subject: Re: [antlr-interest] ANTLRWorks editor slow down
> 
> Terr:
> 
> What I have noticed with ANTLRWorks. The first version I started with
> didn't seem to have the performance and stability problems. My current
> version 1.3.1 does have them. I think I went through two semi-automatic
> upgrades (Two notifications that upgrades were available which I
> naturally accepted.) This version checks for ANTLR syntax errors with
> every keystroke, which I don't recall for my first version. So I would
> definitely check out recent changes.
> 
> The slowdown takes a while to appear. I think I have it more often when
> I am working with the string template generator files than with my
> large toy grammar, but I have definitely seen it with both. FWIW my
> suspicion is a memory leak, but there are other possibilities. I
> believe there was talk a few months ago of using Java's unbuffered IO
> as the default for ANTLR itself, which can have serious performance
> problems, but I suspect is not the cause here. Java's poor default hash
> function could also be a contributor, but that suspicion could just be
> because I am reading Valloud's text, and he has strong opinions on that
> topic.
> 
> On Feb 1, 2010, at 12:40 PM, Terence Parr wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > Jean and I are re-factoring ANTLRWorks to be much simpler in
> anticipation of me taking over maintenance and adding features. The
> first thing I want to do is find out why AW sometimes slows to a crawl.
> I can't seem to reproduce it when I want to, although it was really
> really slow the other day before I decided to debug it! ;)
> >
> > So, I need your help to figure out when it occurs so that it will
> give me a clue about where to look in the source code.   My impression
> is that one of the triggers seems to be when there are lots of errors.
> But, when I added a whole bunch of grammar windows and then started
> randomly inserting errors all over the grammar, memory usage didn't
> really go up and it didn't slow down at all (lots other errors to the
> console, but that's it). I wonder though if it was getting more memory
> available to it in the debugger than when I run it from the jar file.
> Also, I note that sometimes undo is extremely slow, so that is also a
> potential area to look.
> >
> > My current candidates for slowdown:
> >
> > * running out of memory and thrashing
> > * undo mechanism is tracking too much or something
> > * error mechanism somehow  tracks too much or has too much work to do
> >
> > Each keystroke triggers colorizing the editor window, but Jean tells
> me he's sure that the parser itself is okay. might be the error
> handling though.
> >
> > Can anybody reproduce a case where you start ANTLRWorks and then do
> some stuff in the editor window with a grammar (of any size) and it
> starts to get really slow to type? Even if you can't send me your
> grammar, I can send you an instrumented version of AW that will turn
> out some information about what is going on.
> >
> > Thanks! This is my highest priority for AW since I'm using it to
> build v4 ANTLR.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Ter
> >
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> 
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