I noticed today, during the Don’t Panic! contest that my browser was really struggling and at times performance of the IDE and simulator was quite poor. The hiccups were intermittent (at time lasting up to about a minute or so) but nevertheless, using the Chrome Task Manager I could tell that the page was really taxing the GPU and CPU.
I was running in SD so I couldn’t dial down the graphics any further.
So my point is that perhaps it would be useful to have a mode that maybe temporarily disables (stops/pauses) the simulator since it’s not really needed during coding or while examining the console output for debugging.
My machine is a Core i7 (first generation @ 2.8Ghz) with a dedicated nVidia card with 512MB or video ram, and 8GB of RAM (~5 free during contest). It’s older machine but should be decent enough to run the IDE.
I confirm that it was really annoying.
Google Chrome on a quad-core i7 MacBookPro was consuming more than 100% CPU (more than one core fully loaded). Normally cold and silent laptop was hot and noisy - very distracting!
I hope that it was a one-time fuckup and it won’t happen again…
Perhaps a dedicated button on the visualizer to pause/stop the animation might by useful. I think what was happening is I was trying to scroll through the console output, through the different steps and so the code editor was not in focus, and the visualizer was probably getting overloaded.
In addition to said above by mikkanu, I still think that there is a serious performance problem with the visualization code. There is nothing that could justify resource usage at the level of Doom III or GTA.
And yes, there should be a way to disable that video-game in favor of simple and clean wireframe visualization with nothing else but the presentation of essential debug data.
This site is really hard on my pc it does not show correctly in opera and consumes tons of cpu in firefox, its kind of ironic really that a site about coding is suffering from bad optimization.
The performance problems persist. I wonder if it would at all be possible to add a user profile setting to toggle the functionality of the visualizer.
The settings I’d be interested in having are:
debug ON by default (as opposed to OFF as it is now)
console view ON by default (which would make it so instead of getting the visualizer view with the half screen for console, you’d get the full screen console view)
And, in console view, I’d add the timeline controls (BACK, NEXT, PLAY/PAUSE)