On Saturday 12 June 2010 11:55:20 Jose Quesada wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm not sure if this is only on my particular doc, but it seems to me
> that lyx chokes on documents with many subsections?
> It's a notes doc. It may have close to a hundred headinds (section,
> subsection etc).
> Typing becomes slow. Even moving around with the arrow keys shows a
> noticeable delay.
>
> Since LyX is praised for working really well on longer documents, such as
> books, I'm surprised.
> I tried 1.6.4 (ubuntu) 1.6.6 (sabayon) and 2alpha 3 (ubuntu). Same problem.
>
> In this use case, there's almost as much 'section' content as there's
> 'default' paragraph content. Maybe this is abusing the design of LyX...?
>
> Best,
> -Jose
A long, long time ago, back in the Xforms days (yeah, let's not get started on
that), a LyX version had a bug where a moderately long doc would allow the
typist to outrun LyX. It was some problem with a specific algorithm (maybe
shifting X characters by shifting 1 character X times, or something like
that). But since then, I haven't seen a Lyx version that let me (45 to 50 wpm)
get ahead of LyX, even though I've written some fairly big books with lots of
headings. My "Thriving in Tough Times" book has 112 Subsection headers:
=====================
sl...@mydesk:/d/at/books/mental$ cat thrive.lyx | grep "begin_layout
Subsection" | wc -lsl...@mydesk:/d/at/books/mental$
112
sl...@mydesk:/d/at/books/mental$
=====================
I'm using LyX 1.6.4 on Ubuntu 9.10 32bit with 3.4 GB of recognizeable RAM.
=====================
sl...@mydesk:/d/at/books/mental$ lyx -version
LyX 1.6.4 (2009-08-22)
Built on Sep 22 2009, 23:23:06
Configuration
Host type: i486-pc-linux-gnu
Special build flags: aiksaurus warnings use-aspell use-ispell
C Compiler: gcc
C Compiler LyX flags:
C Compiler flags: -g -O2
C++ Compiler: g++ (4.4.1)
C++ Compiler LyX flags:
C++ Compiler flags: -g -O2
Linker flags:
Linker user flags: -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions -Wl,-z,defs -Wl,--as-
ne eded -Wl,-z,defs -Wl,--as-
needed
Qt 4 Frontend:
Qt 4 version: 4.5.2
Packaging: posix
LyX binary dir: /usr/bin
LyX files dir: /usr/share/lyx
sl...@mydesk:/d/at/books/mental$ uname -a
Linux mydesk 2.6.31-20-generic #58-Ubuntu SMP Fri Mar 12 05:23:09 UTC 2010
i686 GNU/Linux
sl...@mydesk:/d/at/books/mental$ head -n1 /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 3346096 kB
sl...@mydesk:/d/at/books/mental$
=====================
Always assuming you're not using a 2004 version that has this known bug, I'd
suspect you might be running short on RAM, or you're using a VERY underpowered
CPU, or something like that.
If I were going to troubleshoot this, I'd reboot the machine and try LyXing
the doc again. Either it's slow or it's not. If it's not, start looking at
other software running concurrently with LyX. If it is, cut a copy of the doc
in half and see whether it's just as slow, half as slow, or not slow at all.
Continue doing this half splitting until you discover the factors
corresponding to slow behavior.
StevET
Steve Litt
Recession Relief Package
http://www.recession-relief.US
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stevelitt
