Severe slowdown when opening menus like alt+f7

The behaviour described in the bug report is either by design, or would be far too complex/time-consuming to be changed

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Suslik
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Severe slowdown when opening menus like alt+f7

Post by *Suslik »

On my new machine (pretty high-end double ssd, over 50 gigs of ram free, intel 10th gen, etc) I noticed that after a long uptime certain TC actions become slower and slower. For example, opening the search menu (alt+f7) takes up to 10+ seconds. If I close it and open it again, it takes 10+ seconds again.

In Process Explorer, there's no significant activity in any of the hardware components when this slowdown happens: network is idling, disk reads about 200Kb or so in TC's process, CPU is idle, RAM unused.

And now the strangest part: if I close my chrome browser (with 50+ tabs), alt+f7 opens like 2x faster in about 5 seconds. If I close a bunch of instances of visual studio, it loads up in 3 seconds. If I close my git client, it opens in 2 seconds. I kept closing stuff that I have running 24/7 and after closing everything it opened in about 1 second, which to be honest is still too long for TC. Question is: how can TC's search window performance depend on other unrelated running processes so heavily?

Unfortunately, I did not have Process Monitor installed prior to closing all my running processes, so I was only able to make a capture after closing everything and when the search window takes 3s to load, which is still way longer than it should be:
Image: https://i.imgur.com/fvfDi16.png
Image: https://i.imgur.com/adb1erf.png

You can see that there's a CreateThread that takes more than 2 seconds (?), but the rest of the time seems to be sort of evenly distributed among other events which does not make much sense to me. Weirdly enough, doing alt+shift+f7 (open search dialog in a separate process) does work 2x faster, but it's still not fast enough.

I tried turning off windows malware protection, but it seemed to have no effect. I sort of ran out of ideas of what else to try.

PS: I run no plugins, only TC of the latest version, x64 version
Suslik
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Re: Severe slowdown when opening menus like alt+f7

Post by *Suslik »

I have also tested this thing on my work machine (windows 10 too, same version of TC, weaker hardware configuration) and it's as fast as I expect it to be: the alt+f7 window takes about 0.5-1s to open. I also checked the Process Monitor thing and it seems to create approx the same number of events, it just seems that delays between those events are drastically shorter. I also have practically the same set of software on my work and on my home machine, so I really don't know what the major difference is.
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Horst.Epp
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Re: Severe slowdown when opening menus like alt+f7

Post by *Horst.Epp »

There was an error and a large delay with Alt-F7 in some previous version of TC
so I guess the poster doesn't run the actual x64 TC version 10.00
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Re: Severe slowdown when opening menus like alt+f7

Post by *Usher »

2Suslik
Do you use TC in the same version and configuration (especially, settings for 'Everything' and wdx content plugins) on both machines?
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Re: Severe slowdown when opening menus like alt+f7

Post by *Suslik »

I actually am running the 10.0 version of TC on my home machine (that has the slowdown problem), but I'm running a 9.0 version at work (that does not have the problem). I hoped to install a 9.0 at home to try to see if it's a regression, but I could not find a download of 9.0 anywhere, where do I get it from?

I don't have any custom plugins installed and all built-in plugins use their default settings.
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Re: Severe slowdown when opening menus like alt+f7

Post by *Dalai »

Suslik wrote: 2021-08-12, 11:20 UTC[...] but I could not find a download of 9.0 anywhere, where do I get it from?
https://www.ghisler.ch/board/viewtopic.php?t=20809
https://www.totalcommander.ch/win/old/?C=M;O=D

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Re: Severe slowdown when opening menus like alt+f7

Post by *Suslik »

So I tested version 9.00 and version 8.5 and they both have the same slowdown issue, although 8.5 has it noticeably less (like, 3 seconds delay vs 6 seconds that 9.00 and 10.00 both have).
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Re: Severe slowdown when opening menus like alt+f7

Post by *petermad »

2Suslik

Could you try to run your TC on your home computer with the wincmd.ini and the wcx_ftp.ini from your work computer - maybe it is a different setting of your home computer's TC that causes the slowdown
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Re: Severe slowdown when opening menus like alt+f7

Post by *ghisler(Author) »

Alt+F7 can take longer under these conditions:
1. There are a lot of entries in the Search in/Search for comboboxes (old searches). These are read from wincmd.ini, and some virus scanner scan the file again and again on each read operation. You can delete older entries from these lists with Shift+Del
2. If there is an older search result with thousands of entries. These are discarded when you close and re-open Total Commander
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Suslik
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Re: Severe slowdown when opening menus like alt+f7

Post by *Suslik »

So I have not really changed anything (still have a million tabs open in chrome, 2 visual studios, etc), but today I noticed that the problem no longer reproduces on the same machine without me doing anything about it.

In exactly the same setup as the last time, now alt+f7 takes about 0.5s to open which is around what I'm used to. I'm not happy about it because problems that seemingly "resolve" themselves like this, tend to come back at the worst possible time later.
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Re: Severe slowdown when opening menus like alt+f7

Post by *Usher »

2Suslik
I think it's been Windows Update in action. Have you restarted your system?
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Re: Severe slowdown when opening menus like alt+f7

Post by *Suslik »

I think I might have restarted the system at some point, but anyway, now it's back to "normal": alt+f7 again takes 5 seconds to open. So I'm open to provide any more info, debugging information and to run some tests if needed.

If ghisler added some sort of profiling time stamps into related functions, I'd gladly run a debug version of TC to track it down, or let me know what else I can do.
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Re: Severe slowdown when opening menus like alt+f7

Post by *ghisler(Author) »

5 seconds is still much too slow, it takes less than a second here. So something is still slowing it down on your system.
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