Plastic 7.x incredibly slow?

[Wolfram]

Hiho.

We recently upgraded from 6.*.1765 to 7.*.2082. And we immediately noticed several performance problems of the Plastic client. For example:

- When clicking on individual changesets in the branch explorer, the info in the "Properties" panel updated instantaneously in 6.x. Now however, you need to wait 0.5-1 seconds after each click for that information to update. This is not a critical problem, but it still is kinda annoying.

- When refreshing the pending changes view, the rotating icon with "Finding changes in workspace..." takes now SEVERAL seconds each time with a moderate amount of "Private" files (say 100-300, which is not much in a Unity project during normal workflow), although this process was barely noticeable in 6.x. This problem feels extremely annoying, especially since we discovered the "Auto-refresh pending changes" option a while ago, and it was just PERFECT, as before people often forgot to refresh the client and therefore often commitet only half of the stuff they wanted to.

I attached our current Pending Changes options. YES I do realize the smallprint what with "lots of private files, this operation could take a while". But as I said, we never noticed any annoying delays in 6.x,  but with 7.x and the "auto-refresh" enabled, the Pending Changes takes several seconds each time the window is re-focused, so even just switching between two windows will trigger the delay. Also, we did not modify any pending changes options between the client upgrade, meaning, we always had "show changed" and "show private" enabled, as well as the two "show manually...".

Is there a way to get to the old, fast behaviour (without having to disable the auto-refresh (which would be a pity) or the "show private" option (which is mandatory for us, to prevent inconsistencies), or is this indeed a regression and will be fixed in the next update?

A positive change seems to be that for projects connected to Jira, refreshing the branch explorer will now instantly(?) show detailed branch titles/infos in the main view, while this procedure took around 8-10 seconds with 6.x. Are these infos now cached?

Our server configuration: external host via ssl, usual ping rates 5-6ms.

Local workspaces located on an internal SSD.

[psantosl]

Hi Wolfram,

We're shocked by this slower pending changes, and we have been checking since we received this 3 hours ago.

@ruben, @Borja and I are looking into this.

Regarding the slower update in Branch Explorer: this can happen because we moved out requests from the main thread, to avoid the GUI hanging. I'll check with Violeta if we can reduce the wait time.

[vsanchezm]

Yes, we moved out requests from the main thread in 7.0.16.1944. But, the server call done to update the "Properties" panel when a changeset is selected in the branch explorer didn't change. Maybe we could see anything else in the logs. Anyway, I will check it in more detail in case it's affected by other change...

 

 

 

[psantosl]

Hi again,

We see the Branch Explorer is slower, and @vsanchezm confirms is not a threading issue. She's going to look deeper into it.

 

Now, we are NOT able to reproduce the most important problem: slower pending changes. We are unable to reproduce it (which matches with our belief, because we didn't make changes on that area, although we might be mistaken). Perf is high prio for us, so any other feedback is welcome.

 

Thanks,

 

pablo

[vsanchezm]

I found the issue that slows down the properties update

It will be fixed in the next release.

Thanks and sorry for the inconveniences.

Violeta

[Wolfram]

1 hour ago, psantosl said:

Now, we are NOT able to reproduce the most important problem: slower pending changes. We are unable to reproduce it (which matches with our belief, because we didn't make changes on that area, although we might be mistaken). Perf is high prio for us, so any other feedback is welcome.

Hi Pablo!

Thanks for the quick response!

I re-checked with two of our projects, and re-installed 6.0.16.1765, and then 7.0.16.2082 again (we didn't test/use any versions in-between), and there is a clear (and big) performance drop with the newer version. I created a screencapture for each case: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1G9CQZrPvco7-KO1ZgPTbE02cQNqHa2DQ

I changed nothing between re-installs, and no Unity or VS (or other CPU hogs) were running during the recordings.

Hope this helps, please tell me if I can be of further assistance in tracking down this problem!

Cheeers,

Wolfram

[Wolfram]

Some more infos:

- I do remember having seen something about pending changes performance in the changelogs, maybe it's related: 7.0.16.1930 "The pending changes view performance was severely degraded when there were tons of changed items in view. This was broken when the tree mode ("view items as a tree"). It was only appreciable with tons of pending changes. Now it's fixed."

- there is no difference whether I switch to tree view or use list view

- toggling "Show changes grouped by changelists" also has no effect

 

[calbzam]

Hi, We would like to get connected to debug your scenario. I've sent you an email.

Regards,

Carlos.

[psantosl]

Hi all,

 

Thanks to Wolfram we found an issue in a log setting we changed in 7.0. The client log is set to 

 

lockingModel type="log4net.Appender.FileAppender+MinimalLock

 

Which is making some antivirus to go nuts and incredibly downgrade performance.

 

We are going to change it in the official release.

 

If you find this issue, you can edit your plastic.log.conf, or cm.log.conf and modify it to be like

 

appender name="FileAppender" type="log4net.Appender.FileAppender"

 

Case closed ?

[Wolfram]

Thanks again for the great support! It's now as fast as before! ?

[manu]

You are very welcome @Wolfram!

 

 

[Christian Southgate]

On 4/27/2018 at 4:03 PM, psantosl said:

If you find this issue, you can edit your plastic.log.conf, or cm.log.conf and modify it to be like

appender name="FileAppender" type="log4net.Appender.FileAppender"

Hi - I am having awful performance problems with the latest Plastic - can you please explain exactly what needs to be modified in the .conf file? Is this a new appender to be added, or does this line replace an existing line in the file?  Thanks

[calbzam]

Hi, are you testing with the last available version from www.plasticscm.com? This issue was already fixed:

[Bug] 7.0.16.2179
Windows GUI and Gluon for Windows: Detected a performance downgrade in the pending changes view due to an interference of Windows Defender antivirus with the log file that Plastic GUI applications write.
This problem happens since release 7.0.16.2068. Now we have minimized the issue by updating the log configuration files for Plastic GUI, Gluon and Mergetool applications, removing the "MinimalLock" locking model.
REMARKS: In case you already customized the

plastic.log.conf

,

gluon.log.conf

or

mergetool.log.conf

, a backup file will be generated with the ".installer.backup" suffix in the same folder.

 

You can temporary rename the "C:\Program Files\PlasticSCM5\client\plastic.log.conf" file to "plastic.log.conf.bck" to check if it makes any difference.

 

Regards,

Carlos.

 

[Carton Jeston]

My performance problems when updating to plastic 7.x seem to be when I have the rename / move option active when refreshing, from a second it happens to ten seconds. The deletion option, however, does not slow down.

 

[manu]

Hello @Carton Jeston,

can you share with us how many private items do you have in your workspace? The more private items you have the more it will impact at the pending changes view performance.

But this should be true for both the current Plastic 7 release and the old 6 and 5.

[Carton Jeston]

I have hundreds of files in the "private" workspace but they were not a problem before. Unfortunately, I can not go back to the previous version to do tests and give more detailed results.

When entering for the first time, it takes 2:15 seconds and when refreshing 10 seconds.

This is not a problem for me, although the solution is to clean the workspace better, it is the feeling that something has changed and maybe it can be improved. It's a bit of feedback and not a complaint ?

My antivirus Eset SS leaves plastic free, I have windows search disabled and I have to try more in this regard. Maybe it was a coincidence that by updating something else in my system and I would like to exhaust all the possibilities.

I also found the message striking when looking for changes in the workspace go wrong and I commented to other friends and it just happens to me ?

a greeting

[Carton Jeston]

Some things that I have tried ...

windows search service does not affect performance

Some folders that I have inside the workspace with material outside the project and that were marked as ignored, now appeared as private. I do not know at what moment I change this, at least it was not manually.

The performance is better, now it takes 90 seconds to load for the first time and 5 seconds to refresh.

I'm sure I did not add anything significant to the workspace, even though I review temporary or similar things beyond my control.

I am sure that by reviewing better I find things to eliminate, in fact I continue to find things that I had ignored and now they are not. I think it's going to be that.


Apart from this, someone happens to you about the message of pending changes in the workspace?
a greeting

[Carton Jeston]

Definitely, something had happened with ignore.conf that was empty, loading many libraries and material that had ignored. I took the opportunity to do a good cleaning and now it goes well even with the option rename / move active.

a greeting

[calbzam]

Hi,

If I properly understand, after cleaning the "ignore.conf" the performance is currently good and you are not facing any issue, right?

Regards,

Carlos.

[Carton Jeston]

No, the problem is that at some point the content of ignore.conf was deleted, where it excluded folders with tons of irrelevant files, until I realized that they were active again. If it did not happen during the plastic update to version 7, it was at some time that I do not know. When you exclude the folder again, it goes like a shot.

[calbzam]

Ok, it's a bit strange. The Plastic upgrade process should not remove any local configuration file (we haven't reported a similar issue before).  

Regards,

Carlos.