Macintosh tagging problems

[mexicowilly]

Hello,
When I create a tag file for Boost on Macintosh, it renders SlickEdit literally unusable. Every time I type "boost::" SlickEdit loses its mind and gives me a spinning beach ball for two minutes. It is impossible to get it out of this state without a force quit, and it consumes 100% of CPU. The fugue state lasts for about two minutes on average, but sometimes longer.

I also use SlickEdit with Boost tags on Solaris, Linux, and Windows, and this problem does not occur on those platforms.

The only solution I have found is to remove the Boost tag file, which is kind of a bummer.

Thanks for any help.

[Matthew]

We'll look into this. What version of boost are you tagging, and how did you install it? I'll try it with boost 1.49 installed via MacPorts for starters.

[mexicowilly]

Thanks a lot for taking a look!

I'm using Boost 1.49, and I just built it myself. In the Boost build I didn't exclude any libraries, so it has everything.

Thank you.

[Matthew]

I tagged boost 1.49 both with v16.1 and the latest internal builds of v17.0. v17 is a little faster due to some recent optimizations with the tags database format and searching, but it's still not snappy.
While 8700+ files *is* a lot to tag, and a 90MB tag file is a little on the large side, these figures are not out of the realm of what SE is designed to handle, so something else is dragging this down. We'll look into what can be done to speed it up.
In the meantime you may want to consider trimming out sections of the boost library that you don't use.  I recreated the boost tag file to include just the .hpp files in the root by deselecting the recursive option when first creating the tag file. Then I added the /container and /regex directories, turning on the recursive option. That resulted in a tag file that was only 2MB, consisting of a little more than 200 files. The performance was not stellar (so there's still something fishy going on), but at least the completions were responsive and usable.

[mexicowilly]

Okay, thanks for taking a look. I'll try to reduce the tag file size and see if I can get a workable one.

When you say it wasn't snappy, do you mean that you also get the spinning beach ball for 2 minutes? Or just that it was kind of slow?

Thank you.

[mexicowilly]

I'm seeing some pretty "un-snappy" performance with standard library tags, too. I just did some tests typing the following:

std::string name;

It takes me about two seconds to type that text. Try it. I'll bet you can do it in less than three.

When I type that with standard library tags enabled it takes 20 seconds for everything up to the semicolon to appear on the screen.

It's a little difficult for me to believe that most programmers have time for that.

I have not noticed this level of sluggishness on other platforms.

Thanks for any help.

[Gered]

Just adding my experiences with this same thing. I've noticed exactly the same sluggish performance as mexicowilly mentions. Typing "std::" is always a guaranteed way to make SlickEdit pause for a few seconds.

Additionally, I experience other random delays while typing code even if that code does not involve something from the std namespace. These other random delays tend to not be nearly so bad though, but still noticeable. I've tried tweaking the context tagging settings, but short of turning it off (might as well use another editor at that point), nothing seems to totally eliminate these kinds of performance issues.

Also, for me this happens on Mac and Linux both.

I feel like I'm stating the obvious, but I'll say it anyway: I cannot stress how incredibly annoying these performance issues are. Would love some kind of fix to address these.