Oslo May 2009 CTP Quadrant's Response is very SLOW

Question

My PC system is fairly powerful. Almost all applications respond almost instantly.

But I am frequently waiting 10 seconds or more for Quadrant to respond to some action.

What is worse is that Quadrant does not put up an hourglass icon or respond in any way initially to an action request, so I am not sure many times wether Quadrant has missed my request or not.

It is a very Bad combination to have a very Slow application and give no indication when the application is working on some action. This is very annoying and unnecessary.

I know, it's only a CTP. Still not very good design.

Answer 1

Hi Don - I'm running Quadrant on a variety of machines here.  Can you give me a few examples of actions where you are seeing long delays?  I'd like to see if I can reproduce the problems and advise on the issues you are seeing.

Thanks in advance - Michael

Answer 2

THANKS for your Response.

I will try and put together some examples of long processing times for you.

The immediate question is not why is Quadrant responses so slow. That problem will need to be addressed before it is released as a developer's productivity tool.

The more pressing issue is: why Quadrant does not provide immediate feedback when an action request is detected and processing begins? Isn't this practice given as guidance in MSFT UI guidelines? How can a user be confident that Quadrant has recognized a request for action when Quadrant does not provide any feedback or response for many seconds? Why doesn't Quadrant always change the icon to an hourglass or some other feedback when the processing of a request may take more than a second or so to execute? Why do the Quadrant designers wish to leave the User guessing if they should continue waiting for Quadrant to respond or to try something else? How hard of a change would this be to make?

In my opinion, Quadrant's UI needs a lot of work to give it more performance and to be much more intuitive and RIA. It needs to do good,  feel good and look good.

I know that it is only a CTP, but the feedback is that it needs to be much better if it wishes to be considered a useful tool.

Answer 3

Hi DonBaechtel,

Would you be able to give us more specific specs on your hardware as well as the scenarios Michael has asked for? I'm looking to try to recreate an environment as similar to yours as possible, and any information you can give about your hardware (cpu type/speed and memory type/speed) you can give will be useful!

If you've already mentioned that in another thread, let me know, and i'll get it from there :)

Andrew

Answer 4

System Information:
OS Name Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Version 5.1.2600 Service Pack 3 Build 2600
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
System Name SCORPIO
System Manufacturer INTEL_
System Model D875BZLK
System Type X86-based PC
Processor x86 Family 15 Model 2 Stepping 9 GenuineIntel ~3192 Mhz
BIOS Version/Date Intel Corp. BZ87510A.86A.0125.P34.0503312215, 3/31/2005
SMBIOS Version 2.3
Windows Directory C:\WINDOWS
System Directory C:\WINDOWS\system32
Boot Device \Device\HarddiskVolume1
Locale United States
Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = "5.1.2600.5512 (xpsp.080413-2111)"
User Name SCORPIO\Don
Time Zone Eastern Daylight Time
Total Physical Memory 3,072.00 MB
Available Physical Memory 1.24 GB
Total Virtual Memory 2.00 GB
Available Virtual Memory 1.96 GB
Page File Space 4.35 GB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys
Video Adapter RADEON 9800 PRO
 
Drive C:
Description Local Fixed Disk
Compressed No
File System NTFS
Size 149.04 GB (160,031,014,912 bytes)
Free Space 42.89 GB (46,058,012,672 bytes)
Volume Name 
Volume Serial Number 90BE470C
 



Installed on this system:

Windows XP SP3 v 20080212.121911 and SQL Server 2008, both with ALL updates installed.

.Net 1.1 v 1.1.4322
.Net 2.0 v 2.2.30729
.Net 3.0 v 3.2.30729
.Net 3.5 SP1
.Net 4.0 Extended Beta 1 v 4.0.20506

Also Hotfix KB943326 to get the Quadrant and Intellipad menus to appear in front on Windows XP.

Answer 5

Thanks DonBaechtel

Answer 6

Hey Don,

Sorry to have taken so long getting back to you on this issue. I've been investigating the performance on a similar system to yours (mine has about half as much memory, but no other significant differences) and I'd have to agree that the performance is less than ideal.

However, I can't offer any solutions that would significantly improve your experience. Unfortunately, for the time being, a system with your specifications is around the lower mark of the bare minimum system requirements for using Quadrant as part of the May CTP.

There's quite a few factors that make this the case, primarily the complexity of the data management systems going on inside Quadrant, and the reliance on SQL Server do add up. Dual-core systems see a significant improvement in performance for Quadrant already, for instance.

That being said, we are committing significant effort to improving the performance of Quadrant and Oslo across the board, so hopefully you should see significant improvements in future releases. I'll be keeping an eye on performance with my test system, and I hope you'll see better results with upcoming releases.