Why is Musescore 2.0 "Development Version" so slow? (and could I just recompile with a 1.3 development version?)

• May 14, 2013 - 16:45

As some may be aware, I'm attempting to modify my own version of Musescore to provide custom notation.

I have Windows 7. About a week or two ago I compiled the "unstable 2.0", but I've found it far too slow to use. This isn't the "debug install" version. This is the "install" version. Just about everything is slow: pushing buttons, entering notes, scrolling through the page, etc. All of these things have a very noticeable lag. Also, in some instances, when I modify a single beamed note in a set of beamed notes, many beamed notes on the page sort of "flicker" between beamed and un-beamed (I wonder if this is an entirely separate bug in its own right or if its indicative of some rather inefficient code)

Have other people noticed this lag or is it just occurring on my machine? Do all manually-compiled, "development versions" suffer from it?

I'm perfectly happy with Musescore 1.3 by itself, and if possible, I'd rather program my modifications in a more stable environment. Is it possible I can re-compile with Musescore 1.3?


Comments

MuseScore 2.0 should not be a lot slower than MuseScore 1.3. But MuseScore 1.3 is for sure more stable than Musescore 2.0 since MuseScore 2.0 is NOT released and labeled as unstable all over the place. Discussion about MuseScore nightlies are better carried out in the technology preview forum and development matters on the dev mailing list or the IRC #musescore on freenode.net.

MuseScore 1.3 will not see any new version or bug fixes. Every new development effort is on MuseScore 2.0.

I don't see any noticeable lag except with Debug builds, and even then, not really all that much when not actually running within the debugger. This is also Windows 7.

So I'd say something is wrong with your environment, but I have no idea.

My builds of MuseScore have been running fine on Windows 8 Pro

No noticeable lag, or slowness which suggests there may be something wrong with your environment.

How much RAM do you have?

How much space on your hard drive?

What speed is your processor?

Is it dual or single core?

All these can have a bearing on the speed applications run.

I had some problems with the navigator panel which under some conditions was updated continuously which made all operations very slow. Overall MuseScore 2.0 is faster than 1.2.

In reply to by [DELETED] 3

No, I'm very familiar with the navigator problem as I've reported it several times. In this case, The custom-built nightly on my two systems (Intel quad 3770 @ 3.4Ghz with a dedicated video card and 8Gb ram under Windows 8 64-bit, and an Intel core2duo @ 3Ghz with 4Gb ram and a dedicated video card under Windows 7 32-bit) and the downloaded nightly exhibit a very noticeable lag when dragging the score around. To me this means my build is the same as the download so I trust it. I can drag v1.3 as fast as I want and the display updating keeps up, but the nightly has a delay, and the display seems to update far less often during the drag. The mouse movement and the score position are definitely out of sync by some hundred milliseconds.

This also affects mouse zoom in/out with the same lag.

Update: turning off the Navigator does indeed make the score dragging and zooming almost as fast as 1.3.

Based on several comments here, it does some seem that others are noticing the lag as well.

And the lag for me isn't just scrolling the screen. Entering in notes has a delay. Clicking on any buttons has a delay. The navigation panels don't have too much of a delay, but opening anything in the navigation panels definitely has a delay.

And my computer is as fast as it should be. Musescore 1.3 runs smooth as water. I may not have a multi-core processor, but I think it sounds ridiculous to expect future users to have state-of-the-art hardware so that things don't feel glitchy.

Is there any way I could just fork Musescore 1.3 for my own "personal" programming? Is it still available through Github or somewhere?

If someone can promise me the lag will go away with later revisions, I guess I could stick with 2.0 for my experimentation.

Also, what else could be wrong with my environment?
Could I have installed something stupidly? Does a "self-compiled" Musescore have more overhead? (and don't ask me to rattle off specs for my computer that's only two years old)

Thank you all for the support.

In reply to by Brindisi

A simple experiment to do:

* Download the 2.0 code and compile (OK, not so simple, but this gets you to setup the compiling environment)
* Download the latest 2.0 prebuilt nightly build and expand into a folder

Now, execute both separately and see if there's any difference in speed between them. There shouldn't be and this means your compilation will be the same as the download and you can rely on yours.

If the slowdown is still happening to both versions, check your Task Manager to see what CPU % MSCORE.EXE is taking while doing tasks. Try disabling the Navigator and test. See if something else is taking up a lot of CPU.

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