[Tb] Scalability

> Does anyone have any experience with very large and complex Tinderboxes?

Pardon me for not replying sooner.

Right now my main file has 1489 notes, 37 agents, 449 aliases,
923 links, 240153 words, and 25 attributes. The agent update
time is reported to be 11666 ms.

I am starting to experience the slowing down commonly reported by
users with large Tinderboxes. My two machines, which perform similarly,
are a 450 MHz G4 with 512 Mb and a 400 MHz G3 with 380 Mb: not really
ideal hardware for Tinderbox.

I've adopted a couple of tricks to deal with the slowness:

Note that agent update time: nearly 12 seconds. I turned off
the option to update agents automatically, which seems to help,
but I have to remember to update manually before exporting, for
example.

Saving the file (2.5 Mb) takes about 30 seconds. This is only
a big issue when writing: I hate to lose work, so, like many
seasoned (old) computer users, I have developed the "save tick":
hitting Apple-S as a reflex after almost every line. Naturally,
this won't work when saving takes half a minute. My solution is
to use external editors: I've worked out a kludge to do this
pretty smoothly with Tinderbox that I'll describe later.

Of course spell checking on the fly has been turned off since
day one.

There is an annoying delay (7 seconds or so) after editing the
value of an attribute in a text view. You just get a wait cursor
after clicking in the text window before you can continue editing.
This is true even for clicking the box for a boolean attribute.
It's faster to use the "get info" window rather than editing in
the text window (but there is a bug here:
if the text window is open then it will continue to display the
pre-edited values of the attributes). For a bunch of notes, I use a
stamp, although that also has become very slow.

There was a general slowness to the interface - grabbing notes,
resizing them, navigating through the map view - that seems to
have improved with recent updates to the program, along with
a lot of other interface improvements that have gone unremarked,
as far as I can see (it's easier to grab the handles to resize
a note now, for example).

Some things remain fast, hardly affected by the growing file size:
find is still blazing; HTML export is quite fast (but might be
faster without the useless writing of strings to the progress
box: one interface tweak that's not an improvement); creating notes,
making links, and many other similar tasks are practically
instantaneous.

Finally, Tinderbox remains one of the most stable GUI programs
on my computer. I was reminded of this a few days ago when it
crashed, and it struck me how unusual that was: I hadn't seen Tinderbox
crash in months.
Received on Tue Dec 7 18:48:55 2004