InfoQube IM - Community

Submitted by Jon on 2009/10/02 08:12

I have written before about the problems with multi line display. Until this is resolved, I have been pasting each line into a separate item, then locking the items. For a few reasons, this is not ideal. Pasting as a single item is quite fast. I recently had a paper which contained 140 paragraphs (interpreted as lines - this is fine for me), but the pasting took forever (OK, longer than 10 minutes on a fast dual core machine loaded with memory). The last time I encountered a program that was unusually sluggish to perform normal tasks, I bellyached to the developer who improved the performance dramatically (Ultra Recall). With that one exception, I have not encountered a program that performed so poorly and maxed out the CPU while chugging along. I havve some programs that are either very old (Ecco Pro) or based on very old code (Info Select) which accomplish this and similar tasks in a heartbeat or two. IQ is an remarkable concept, but really...

Oh, and before sombody suggests using the html pane, I really prefer Ecco type single pane, multi column outliners. The html pane has its uses, I can see that, but just not for me.

Thank you.

Jon

Comments

Jon, I promise not to suggest that you use the html pane

but I'm not clear what you want to do.

I was playing around w what I thought was your issue this morning but to be clear:

You copy a # of paragraphs from source 'A'

and you want to paste into IQ -- how?

Each graph as a separate item?

Join all the graphs into one item?

Could you explain w a little more detail & I could try to test to see if there's a better way.

Thanks.

Jan Rifkinson

Ridgefield CT USA

HP Blackbird Vista Ultimate SP-2

For example, try copying all the text in this NY Times article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/magazine/04anxiety-t.html?_r=1&hpw=&p…

Then go to a grid and right click. Choose "Paste," then "Paste each line into a separate item."

Do you see what I mean?

Jon

There are performance issues with paste (or entering) large amount of text in the grid. These should go in the HTML pane.

[quote=Jon]

For example, try copying all the text in this NY Times article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/magazine/04anxiety-t.html?_r=1&hpw=&p…

Then go to a grid and right click. Choose "Paste," then "Paste each line into a separate item."

Do you see what I mean?

[/quote]

Yes. It took 90 seconds

Jan Rifkinson

Ridgefield CT USA

HP Blackbird Vista Ultimate SP-2

[quote=Jon]

For example, try copying all the text in this NY Times article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/magazine/04anxiety-t.html?_r=1&hpw=&p…

Then go to a grid and right click. Choose "Paste," then "Paste each line into a separate item."

Do you see what I mean? [/quote]

Jon,

...

Okay, I start again - the link you gave redirects to the first page of the article - you have to go down to the bottom and click print

I presume you selected everything on the page.

There are images on the top of the page - these wont go into the grid.

It took less than 30 seconds to paste here (selecting everything on that page) took a little less if I dont select the images.

Pierre -

I know you dont allow single items to have a lot of text - but I think this is a fair test of IQ - if you paste the text as single lines - i.e. one item per sentence.

In my case it worked acceptably (IMO) dont know why it took 10 minutes for Jon... Do you have any ideas Jon - did you do something differently to the way I described above?

edit/ below average dual core machine with 2GB memory here

[quote=Tom]

Do you have any ideas Jon - did you do something differently to the way I described above?

edit/ below average dual core machine with 2GB memory here

[/quote]

Your question caused me to experiment a bit. I just tried pasting the same articlle into a new, blank database and got results similar to yours. But a 90 - 120 seconds (I tried it on two machines) is still unacceptably long and takes up 100% (50% of total CPU) of the CPU core allocated to IQ,.This does not address what happens in the real world where I would want to paste this information into my existing IQ files. Six minutes ago I started the pasting process again in my original file. It's stilll chugging along...

Jon

Hi Jon, I'm going to make some tests on my side as performance is very important to me too.

Pierre : something happened with performance and this release. Deleting items here is much slower, and so is expanding hierarchies (ctrl-9 on big hierarchies.)

172 items (paragraphs from a big text) approx105 sec. This is slow, yes...

But I have lots going on in my DB

In a blank DB : approx. 58 sec, which is almost twice as fast. Still a bit too slow -- not much going on in the background so no "real reason" for that slowness.

Jon : even it shouldn't be an excuse for poor performance, we have to keep in Mind that IQ is a lot more complex than most outliners out there in terms of 1- hierarchies, 2- parents, 3- links between items, 4- inheritance, 5 field formulas, etc. etc. Of all the outliners I know, Ultra Recall is the closest in terms of complexity.

on my 6 year-old notebook:

15 seconds if item wordwrap is off and
120 seconds with item wordwrap on

Steps were:

open sample database
new grid
open referenced web page
click print at the bottom
select all text
Ctrl-C
back in IQ, Paste (option Paste each line into a separate item...)

I looked at the various steps in adding items and managed to improve it significantly. Fron 120 seconds, it is down to 23 seconds.

sounds good

what's Item wordwrap ?

field properties>>multi-line

On my 1 yr old machine w the fastest components available at the time of purhase, I repeated the test under my normal working circumstances (26% ram in use)

with wordwrap 120 seconds as reported in an earlier post

w/o wordwrap 80 seconds

Jan Rifkinson

Ridgefield CT USA

HP Blackbird Vista Ultimate SP-2

Is this on a sample database with the latest build (0.9.24G8) ?

yes

Jan Rifkinson

Ridgefield CT USA

HP Blackbird Vista Ultimate SP-2

I retested with new version (G8).

for 172 items (paragraphs from a big text)

Before, with multi line on, approx 105 sec.

Now, with multi line (wordwrap) on : 59 sec

Now, with multi line (wordwrap) off : 50 sec

This is as TLIs, no inheritance.

Now, with 1 field with inheritance, all text pasted as subitems of one item, multiline (wordwrap)on : 81 sec

[Sorry about the 172 items vs you guys 120... It's just that I copied and pasted a part of a text and it gave 172 items]

[quote=jan_rifkinson]

On my 1 yr old machine w the fastest components available at the time of purhase, I repeated the test under my normal working circumstances (26% ram in use)

with wordwrap 120 seconds as reported in an earlier post

w/o wordwrap 80 seconds

[/quote]

This is weird as my computer is a more than 3years old Dell Inspiron 6400 (dualcore 1.8ghz, 2gb of ram, windows XP).

Could Vista be one of the cause here ?? as my performance is better than yours (though not as good as Pierre's -- but I'm not using a blank dB) with a much older computer. It's still not great, but almost twice faster than before... not negligible.

[quote=Armando]

for 172 items (paragraphs from a big text)

(Before, with multi line on, approx 105 sec.)

Now, with multi line (wordwrap) on : 59 sec

Now, with multi line (wordwrap) off : 50 sec

This is as TLIs, no inheritance.

Now, with 1 field with inheritance, all text pasted as subitems of one item, multiline (wordwrap)on : 81 sec

[Sorry about the 172 items vs you guys 120... It's just that I copied and pasted a part of a text and it gave 172 items]

[/quote]

Redid the same steps with the same URL (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/magazine/04anxiety-t.html?_r=1&hpw=&p…)

Took 26 seconds (on my 6 year old single-core PC with only 780MB of ram) (to be more precise, it took 13 seconds to import and another 12 seconds to update the grid. Opening this grid afterwards also takes 12 seconds)

In my own DB, same article (full) took about 30s (total).

created 182 items -- depending on how you copied/pasted

Grid opening took about the same as you.

Quicker than my last try.

The length in performance seems to depend on some or all of these factors:

1- the amount of items (of course)

2- the length of item text

3- inheritance applied to items as they are created

4- maybe the source if the text -- my first source was MS Word.

I have only been using the data referenced in the original post from Jon

and I give up

Jan Rifkinson

Ridgefield CT USA

HP Blackbird Vista Ultimate SP-2

Pasted the selected text from link (minus a few things at the top and bottom) in a test grid, no inheritance.

142 items, 33 sec.

Not a speed demon, but better than yesterday.

I still don't understand how you get such a poor performance, Jan.

It'll be interesting to see what time Jon gets.

[quote=Armando]

I still don't understand how you get such a poor performance, Jan.

[/quote]

Me neither. Did another test

vG8,

2 hrs later & after a nap

same machine, w/o reset or anything

while downloading & playing music from Zune

From the original source, following directions as posted by Jon

140 items

item multiline on @ 18.23 secs

item multiline off @ 19.42 secs

moving on

Jan Rifkinson

Ridgefield CT USA

HP Blackbird Vista Ultimate SP-2

AH ! There you go. Nothing like a good nap.