Performance of Designer

Just wondering if everyone is experiencing the same performance with the designer. I work in 2 products, Visual Studio, and the Metastorm Designer. The Metastorm Desginer's performance really frustrates me - as it seems tremendously slow. The performance is flat-out abysmal. The 7.6 designer was better, but not as friendly.

I did some timing this morning, and a moderately simple Solution takes about 15 seconds to load. Upon clicking an Event Handler, it takes about 7 seconds for a Visual Script window to appear. Just trying to use the ConcatentateText function with 7 parameters takes 41 seconds to load the display of the parameters.

When I look at performance monitor, it sets 1 core of my processor to 100% for the 41 seconds it takes to load the 7 strings. I can't imagine that any product I would build would survive if it showed performance even 1/4 that poorly. 7 strings should not take 1 second to load. Even constructing controls from scratch using reflection would not take that long.

Is everyone seeing this?

It's definately not my hardware. I have a very fast machine (Core2Duo processor, 8 GB RAM, 250 GB SSD Hard Drive).

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Comments

Brian Echard

What version of designer are you running? I am running 9.0.3 and I did find some improvement over the version prior to that. Fundamentally though I have issue with the way the designer refreshes as you do certain functions. I also find myself waiting more than I did in v7.6. I would upgrade to the latest updates if you can.

rposener

I'm on 9.0.3 HotFix 2.

Brian Echard

I dont have any suggestions after that. If you use 9.01 then switch back to 9.03 it will feel faster.

Jerome_Pearce

Well, myself and some others have posted here about this issue. It is frustrating, but it has improved a great deal in 9.0.3. Just be glad you were not using it in 9.0.0!

I have also been told that there are improvements in 9.1 too.

To be fair, there is a whole lot more in version 9 than ever was in version 7. A great deal of it is third party components too, so control is less. I have noticed that the first time I load any type of component, be it a process, visual script of C# code, it takes a long time, as does the initial Designer load (that takes a loooong time). Generally switching between many components is slowish, too. The window closes, then opens the first window, then opens the one (it thinks) it should open. The trick is to have a nearly empty first window, or keep closing your windows. As I predicted well over a year ago, the 'close other tabs' from the window tab will become the mist popular menu option.

I have an i7 quad core processor, and still I have to wait around a lot. Running on a 64 bit OS is not ideal either, and that is true of all 32 bit apps I find - same as 16 bit apps on 32 bit OS used to be.

My solution: Have two monitors, and while one app is 'waiting' I work on another - ye olde multi-threaded development! As we mostly work remotely, I often have two remote connections open and just switch between them during wait times.

rposener

I appreciate the responses. It sounds like it's how the product works for now. Unfortunately, that is really a poor answer. It is disappointing to me that Metastorm does not care about the developers, and customers more. It seems that the majority of the improvements in 9 versus 7.6 were driven by 2 things:

They used outside controls from Telerik on the Web product - which work much better than their own in 7.6.
They tried to improve the designer / developer experience quite a bit.

Not to be too harsh, but I'm starting to question the value of this product. As a developer / designer, I don't really find the value that I had before. Before, the value was that I could develop something and get it into production very quick and very easy. Version 9 has removed both of these qualities from the product in my opinion.

At this point, having been working on our 9 conversion for a couple months, I almost feel like I'd be better off moving to another product. The major issues I found while trying to work with the version 9 product are:

Designer is a complete pain to work with, despite the new features (if you add features that are unusable, why add them?)
C# development was a big selling point for 9 for me, but holds the following issues (poor implementation of Custom Types | poor intellisense implementation | 6-year-old .Net Framework being used).
Business Objects seem about half-baked, and don't provide any real value (Can't be used from C# code, etc.)
Forms design is not easily extensible with custom web controls (I thought this was originally one of the version 9 features?)
Deployment is completely screwed up, and takes about 5 work-arounds just to be able to publish from a remote machine.
Remote Debugging is not possible, development in a UAC configured environment, or not as administrator is not possible.

I cannot think of any other product or vendor that we continue to buy and pay for support with such severe issues. I know Metastorm staff monitor some of these threads, would love to hear some real answers from them?

Brian Mellert

I also feel performance is a turtle compared to what it used to be. It has gotten better though has a ways to go. Hopefully it will improve again in 9.1 which last I heard we should see in May.

I'm curious about what will happen in the future. I heard that OpenText may be planning on replacing the designer and UI with their own tool. Guess we work through what we have now and worry about that then. (Version 10 perhaps -- if it comes about.)

Thomas_Prinsloo

I'm in agreement that the v9 Designer is not the fastest horse in the stable. It's almost like a donkey... you can throw stuff on it's back, but the more you throw on, the closer you get to it refusing to budge.

I keep my workspace clean - multiple open tabs kills performance on my side.

I also find that v9 Designer has a tendancy to corrupt more than I'd like it to, and requires all sorts of deleting of temp files.

And the error logging isn't as effecient as it was before...in v7.6 errors were a lot more informing. (I guess the addition of a Debug mode sort of makes up for that)

I won't deny, v9 is a whole lot more than what v7.6's designer was, the object oriented design approach is lovely (the times it works) and the things that are new, I do love... but the performance of the designer really needs a lot of work. Like you said, who waits 41 seconds to assign a few variables.

PS In my experience you can use Business Objects in your C# code... I guess it depends what you want to do with it...

Jerome_Pearce

It is NOT Object Oriented! It is code generation using objects (the Microsoft way - OO passed them by without a second wave).

I agree, it can get cumbersome at times. I tend to create a code segment to manage multiple assignments if there are more than a couple. We do try to use Visual Scripts as much as possible.

One massive bugbear I have C# functions promoted to Visual Script activities. When you want to add a parameter, you break all existing activities, and they have to be replaced! The same with adding a parameter to a flag. That is just NOT acceptable from a maintaince point of view.

Workaround for the former issue here:

Metatsorm BPM Version 9 Hints & Tips

But I'd love to see a workaround for the latter.