Sloooow piece animation

[revenant]

Hi, this might be related to the "Disconnecting during a session" thread but I'm not sure so I'll start a new topic.

Sometimes I notice that piece animation on the display board has slowed way down during a tactics session.  The effect is seen mainly where the computer is playing out its response but is also seen somewhat when I'm trying to click and drag one of my pieces to make my move.  The animation becomes choppy and sluggish and when one piece is taking another you see them superimposed over each other on the target square for a second (which is actually kind of neat, like if you stick one decal over another on a window).

I can't quantify it but I think it gets worse the more problems you've done during the session.  If I logout and log back in the pieces go back to being perky and responsive.

Is something in the interface code on the client side crunching CPU?  Maybe some sort of "n-squared" effect where a calculation needs to search back through all the problems played so far in the session?  If so, perhaps that calculation can be made linear or it can be distributed more equally in time.

My browser is Firefox under SUSE Linux.

[richard]

Hi revenant,

I've noticed similar issues on Firefox 2 (which leaked memory like a sieve), after a long session things start to slow down. For me with FF2, this happened pretty much on all websites not just CT.  Firefox 3 seems a little better in this respect, which version of firefox are you currently using?  There is no searching back through old problems but it is possible there is some data structure that is not getting freed up between problems that eventually gets so large that the browser has to swap memory in and out to perform tasks. I've tried running some javascript memory debuggers in the past but didn't find anything conclusive, it sounds like there is definitely still an issue there though.

Regards,
Richard.

[revenant]

Thanks for the tip.  I upgraded from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3, and just now the piece animation is still zippy even after a session of 150 problems (a slight choppiness did get introduced about the 50th problem, but it is nowhere near as distracting as before).

I'm not sure yet how this applies to other websites, as oddly enough I don't visit other websites very often since I found Chess Tempo.   :-)

[drahacikfm]

Yes, there should be super-premium membership for $50 a year which kicks you off each day after you have spent 2 hours here!

[richard]

revenant: Glad FF3 works a bit better, there is still clearly some kind of issue I haven't managed to track down yet.

drahacik: :-)  , hey isn't that what the "next button" bug is for? :-)

I've finished the current problem set verification run , so the new problem set is ready to upload, I'm just generating a few more new problems to replace some of the ones removed and should be able to do a problem set update and site upload this weekend.  Once this is done I can put a bit more effort into tracking down a few unresolved bugs.

Regards,
Richard.