Appearance of Help Tags seems very inconsistent & sluggish

For seeking technical help with Digital Performer and/or plug-ins on Windows.

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This forum is for seeking solutions to technical problems involving Digital Performer and/or plug-ins on Windows, as well as feature requests, criticisms, comparison to other DAWs.
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Kraznet
Posts: 12
Joined: Tue Jul 26, 2005 10:01 pm
Primary DAW OS: Windows
Location: London UK

Appearance of Help Tags seems very inconsistent & sluggish

Post by Kraznet »

Help tags or tooltips as I call them are very useful and invaluable when learning a new DAW. But I notice they are very slow to appear sometimes. You can see from my animation once the first help tag has appeared for a particular group of icons the rest appear fairly quickly. But when I shift to another group of icons initial pop-up is delayed.

Image

Regards
Kraznet
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RangerJ ay
Posts: 11
Joined: Wed Oct 10, 2007 11:11 am
Primary DAW OS: Windows

Re: Appearance of Help Tags seems very inconsistent & sluggi

Post by RangerJ ay »

This is due to the lag time introduced by loading the tool tip "series" from disk. It is common practice not to automatically load tool tips into RAM, so that an application will not use excess RAM for something that may not be needed very often. Also, there is a "built-in" delay before displaying tips; you don't want a bunch of pop-ups appearing every time you happen to move the cursor over a button.

If you'll notice, you see this in the OS itself. Hover the cursor over any icons in your taskbar, and you will see the same behavior. However, once they are loaded, they may remain somewhat "instantaneous" for a while.

They are probably loaded in a "series" from disk. That is why the first one takes a while, then the rest of the tips (those contained in the series of related interface items) appear more quickly. Also, it depends on how threads and memory are used/managed within the application. Another problem with lag may be due to they way an application prioritizes its event loop. An application has to constantly monitor ALL input "messages" and then "decide" what to do. Some things need immediate attention. Other things may have to wait. I would assume that tool tips aren't real high on the totem pole...
ASRock X58 Extreme3 mobo, Intel Core i7, 12 GB RAM, Win 7 64, WD Black drives (multiple), Focusrite Saffire PRO 24 (FireWire), Dual Acer monitors with NVidia GeForce 9400 (DVI), M-Audio Axiom 49 keyboard, DP 8.03.
Kraznet
Posts: 12
Joined: Tue Jul 26, 2005 10:01 pm
Primary DAW OS: Windows
Location: London UK

Re: Appearance of Help Tags seems very inconsistent & sluggi

Post by Kraznet »

It is common practice not to automatically load tool tips into RAM, so that an application will not use excess RAM for something that may not be needed very often
I can understand this being an issue maybe 10 or more years ago when RAM was limited. But I have 16 GB on my machine and I'm sure loading the tooltips into RAM wouldn't be a problem. I've checked out tooltips response on various other DAW's and they all pop up consistently as fast as well. OK it's not a deal breaker but it is a bit frustrating.
I would prefer if they responded immediately and of course if that becomes annoying there is always the option to turn them off.

Regards
Kraznet
Zhah001
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Feb 23, 2015 4:46 am
Primary DAW OS: Windows

Re: Appearance of Help Tags seems very inconsistent & sluggi

Post by Zhah001 »

Knoob, Please write -RESOLVED after the topic name so it´s not an "ongoing problem".
You can do this by editing your first post. Thanks :)
DdD DeViL
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