This should fix issue #235.
Recently ConfigTool has been very slow for me on Ubuntu Linux.
When I run the app there is a 15 second wait before the window is
first displayed. I bisected the problem and found it was tied to
the number of pins in `pinNames`, and ultimately that it was
caused by a slow initializer in wx.Choice() when the choices are
loaded when the widget is created. For some reason, moving the
load after the widget is created is significantly faster. This
change reduces my startup time to just under 4 seconds.
Further speedup could be had by using lazy initialization of the
controls. But the controls are too bound up in the loaded data
to make this simple. Maybe I will attack it later.
There is still a significant delay when closing the window, but I
haven't tracked what causes it. Maybe it is caused just by
destroying all these pin controls.
In the process of making this change, I wanted to simplify the
number of locations that bothered to copy the pinNames list and,
to support lazy loading, to try to keep the same list in all
pinChoice controls. I noticed that all the pinChoice controls
already have the same parameters passed to the addPinChoice
function which makes them redundant and confusing. I removed the
extra initializers and just rely on pinNames as the only list
option in addPinChoice for now. Maybe this flexibility is needed
for some reason later, but I can't see a purpose for it now.
Notes by reviewer Traumflug:
First of all, which "trick"? That's an excellent code
simplification and if this happens to make startup faster (it
does), all the better.
Measured startup & shutdown time here (click window close as soon
as it appears):
Before: With this commit:
real 0m4.222s real 0m3.780s
user 0m3.864s user 0m3.452s
sys 0m0.084s sys 0m0.100s
As the speedup was far more significant on the commit author's
machine, it might be a memory consumption issue (leading to
swapping on a small RAM machine). Linux allows to view this in
/proc/<pid>/status.
Before: Now:
VmPeak: 708360 kB 708372 kB
VmSize: 658916 kB 658756 kB
VmHWM: 73792 kB 73492 kB
VmRSS: 73792 kB 73492 kB
VmData: 402492 kB 402332 kB
Still no obvious indicator, but a 300 kB smaller memory footprint
is certainly nice.
We can't magically find out what the right pin is, but we can at
least make sure it gets written with valid syntax next time. This
also ensures pins can be handled in the GUI, avoiding failures
like the one reported by inline comments here:
b9fe0a5dd0
So far for choices based on boolean sets, only, because choices
for values typically need no more readable names.
This elegantly removes the somewhat ugly check for '(', too.
Previously, values of ignored keys simply got lost and were
replaced with the ones from from the metadata file. Now this
value is preserved and perhaps, some time in the future, we'll
use this bit of information to to provide the right value when
re-enabling it.
That is, buttons and choices. Coices apparently don't work. Tried
a bit on the table heaters of the sensor and heater lists, but
found nothing which would result in an effect. This control is
not exactly well documented.
The problem was, applying tooltips to the radio buttons directly
showed no effect on Linux. While this is likely a bug in wxPython,
we can't change this behaviour.
The solution is to also apply these help texts to the surrounding
StaticBox. This works, even for the radio buttons.
This solves issue #149.
Nico Tonnhofer
Phil Hord
Markus Hitter
jbernardis