XMetaL’s CSS-View: Extremely slow with documents over 500 kb

[spyro]

Hi there,

I got several XML-files with 1-3 MB in size. When editing text in “Tags On View” with XMetaL 5, the performance decreases dramaticly to about 2-3 letters (!) per second on a Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.67 GHz with 3 GB RAM. Are there any ways to achieve acceptable working speeds?

spyro

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[Derek Read]

Most Likely Cause – CSS background-color:
A CSS background-color or border property may be defined on elements that take up a “large” portion of your documents. Here “large” means they might contain enough content to span one or more “screens-full” of content (obviously becoming more likely the larger a document is).

The solution for this is to remove as many of these CSS properties as possible when they occur on such elements. In this particular case (as editing speed appears slow to the extreme) I would comment them all out (or remove them) and then add them back one by one to find the most obvious culprit.

Sometimes people set background-color:white, or similar, on the root element or $DOCUMENT (one of our special CSS selector extensions) which should not be necessary.

This is a known limitation with our rendering engine that is difficult to address, so we may not do anything about it for quite some time (if ever).

Second Thing to Check – CTM:
This might not be CSS it might be related to your CTM file. If your CTM file displays an XFT form inline (replacing a particular element) and that element appears many times in a document that may be the cause. The issue here is that each copy of XFT instantiates its own Windows Script Host (that same script engine used by XMetaL Author itself). The easiest way to think about this is to equate this to loading a separate copy of Internet Explorer for each XFT appearing in the document (both memory and CPU cycles are eaten up).

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[spyro]

Thank you (again!),

I deactivated all borders around container elements and XMetaL runs smooth like a babies ass now. 🙂
The new css is not as good as the unmodified one in terms of clarity but the ability to type text with more than 2 fps is more important to me. 😉

Rupert Jung

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