Version 5.2

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Leo Graywacz
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Re: Version 5.2

Post by Leo Graywacz »

Yes, memory management is where I was headed. I really am not up on what you are using for a programing language these t=days. Last time I was programing computers I was using MASM. Talk about doing it the long and hard way. :joker:

My main concern was that every time you make a change it seems to rewrite the information of the whole cabinet/job rather than just the piece you changed. I know that everything is somewhat interactive and changing one part affects how others behave. But I get tired of waiting for my computer to play "drawer builder" when all I did was change the way the back was attached. If I have 6 dovetail drawers in a cabinet and change the back from flush to dado it re-renders all the drawers and this takes a lot of time. I was wondering if this type of memory management was going to be imposed in V6.0? I really wasn't asking what programming system was going to be used. I would like the program to be more time oriented. Sometime I really get annoyed waiting for it to something that it really shouldn't have to be doing. I am not running a supercomputer by any means (1.8Ghz Dell 9400) but I shouldn't have to wait 8 minutes while it renders drawers that haven't been changed or affected in any ways. This question came about because it took me almost an hour to add a simple 1 1/4" rail between 2 drawers. The program was fighting me. The night before when I designed the cabinet it seemed to be nice. Thanks.
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DanEpps
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Re: Version 5.2

Post by DanEpps »

Only teasing you Leo. :joker:

From my observations (using various debuggers), memory management in eCabinets is HUGE issue. We have discussed these issues in the forum before but they indeed bear revisiting.

When you take a cabinet or room into the Line Drawing Editor, a complete copy of the object is made--for each page in the LDE. If the object uses a lot of memory (room layout?), each page with that object in the LDE uses a lot of memory. Improvements have been made to be sure, but ther is still a long way to go. At one point I think Larry was investigating using images instead of the full object for the LDE but then the objects couldn't be easily dimensioned or manipulated.

Another thing that takes a lot of time (and memory) is regenerating the entire cabinet when changes are made in one of the editors. For an example lets use your cabinet with six dovetail drawer boxes. Say you want to change a shelf location and the shelf has nothing to do with the drawer locations or sizes. After you make the change, it appears that the entire cabinet, including all of the drawer boxes, is regenerated. When you exit the Shelf/Partition Editor and return to Main, the entire cabinet is regenerated again. I can see the need to regenerate the entire cabinet when a change affects other components but not for every change then again when returning to Main.

The really comes into play when you start bumping up against Windows-imposed memory limits and there is nowhere left to store the data.

I think HOOPS is responsible for a lot of the memory issues we see in eCabinets though. All data for the cabinet is stored in a single HOOPS Streaming Format (HSF) file. Something like a dovetail drawer box has literally thousands of points that have to be plotted. This takes a lot of data in the HSF file which in turn, takes a lot of memory.

Is there a solution? Is it possible to put drawer boxes for example, in a separate file and reference that file in the main cabinet file? I don't know whether this is possible or not. If it is possible the cabinet file could contain only structural components and a reference to the drawer box file for each drawer box in it (your "pointers").

Maintaining separate, referenced files for items other than structural components that are integral to the cabinet could save a lot of memory--but (and this is a big but), it would require a major redesign effort, not to mention a lot of time, to accomplish.

I'm sure the development team has worked hard on solving this very difficult problem. Users feel the pain when using eCabinets and the developers feel the pain with every post about improving eCabinets' performance.

Its a tough issue to solve.
Nick M Singer
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Re: Version 5.2

Post by Nick M Singer »

I think eCabs qualifies for the "Microsoft award for delayed distribution " about now :lol: :lol:
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Dean Fehribach
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Re: Version 5.2

Post by Dean Fehribach »

Nick M Singer wrote:I think eCabs qualifies for the "Microsoft award for delayed distribution " about now :lol: :lol:
No chance at that award. Vista was, what, five years in the waiting?
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Georgi Baltov
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Re: Version 5.2

Post by Georgi Baltov »

Dean,
just dont make the Microsoft mistake of releasing Vista that is comlete garbage. We would rather wait a bit longer but for something that is worthed. We dont want to be switching back to 5.2 after the release of 6.
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DanEpps
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Re: Version 5.2

Post by DanEpps »

Dean Fehribach wrote:
Nick M Singer wrote:I think eCabs qualifies for the "Microsoft award for delayed distribution " about now :lol: :lol:
No chance at that award. Vista was, what, five years in the waiting?
Hey, Windows 7 has reached milestone 1 and is on track for a 2010 release. Of course Microsoft won't say how many milestones there are or whether that is 1/1/2010 or 12/31/2010... :wink:
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Neville Bastian
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Re: Version 5.2

Post by Neville Bastian »

How about we skip 5.2 and go 5.3. We missed Christmas now Easter so what's the next big event in the States, July 4th?
Can't we have it released with a few problems and fix those with updates. We need something to complain about on the forum. That's part of the fun.
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Neville
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