🚀 go-pugleaf

mlelstv@serpens.rhein.de (Michael van Elst) writes:
>jasonb@cs.uwa.edu.au (Jason S Birch) writes:
>>You're right, it was because of Executive. I rebooted without it and
>>suddenly it started working the same as IBrowse, even following links
>>in part-loaded pages while the .html was still loading just like
>>IBrowse does. Unfortunately the whole machine became sluggish while it
>>was processing (boy, it's really easy to notice the difference when
>>you're not running Executive!).

>Well, that happens when you have to do calculations.

Only if you do the calculations at the same priority as your event
handling.

>>Perhaps the author could work on his
>>multithreading a little to make it Executive-friendly,

>I believe that this is Executive's task to be friendly. AWeb just starts
>tasks at the same priority and Exec time-slices these. And Executive simply
>stops the processing and rendering because it is an unimportant CPU intensive
>background task. I.e that is exactly what it is supposed to do, but since it
>only guesses what you want to do it sometimes guesses wrong.

If AWeb put the image decoding at a lower priority itself (which is a
reasonable thing to do, and even more desired if you're not running
Executive -- using Gadtools and CA means that the buttons respond to
your clicks immediately, but the whole thing still feels sluggish if
the app continues decoding images for several seconds after you've
told it to follow a link or stop transferring) then Executive wouldn't
have a problem. Why would you *want* to have a CPU-intensive and
non-time-critical task like image decoding (who cares if the image
takes 1/2 a second longer to appear in your document?) running at the
same priority as your event handling code (*I* care if every button
click takes 1/2 a second longer to be handled)?

>>is? Is he relying on the tasks to be at certain priorities?

>No. The tasks run at the same priorities and are timesliced. When Executive
>reduces the priority of the CPU intensive processing task it simply stops.

This raises an interesting point. The image processing and network
downloading tasks are handled separately, but it appears the page
layout is handled by the same task that handles user interface events.
When writing a MUI program, *any* CPU intensive code will be offloaded
(by a good programmer) onto a subtask, because if they don't buttons
won't depress when clicked on, etc. But in this case, because the
buttons are quite successfully depressed by Intution, a CPU intensive
operation is carried out by the same task that is supposed to be
processing incoming events, making the whole thing feel sluggish. The
ironic end result is that the MUI program actually feels *more*
responsive.

>>One other thing I noticed - when typing into a string gadget on a
>>form, the whole border of the gadget is redrawn with each keypress. I
>>presume this is also a CA problem.

>AFAIK the form gadgets are not CA.

Ok. I noticed that the textarea gadget (for multi-line string forms)
also redraws the border with each keypress.

BTW, in case anyone feels I'm being a little unfair to AWeb here, I'd
like to point out that I think these really are fairly minor problems.
It's currently the most stable and, I think, best HTML 2 browser for
the Amiga. It could be nicer if it borrowed a few more ideas from
IBrowse, such as automatic proxy disabling for certain sites, lower
priorities for background CPU-intensive tasks, persistent disk cache,
etc. I think IBrowse will still turn out to be the best overall,
however, once a stable release version is on the market.

>>Oh, and also, the last demo of
>>IBrowse supports AS225r2 (I know you were complaining about this,
>>Michael) but I haven't been able to get it to work yet (works fine
>>under AmiTCP4.0 demo, fails to make any network connections under
>>AS225r2, with or without renaming the http.library as indicated).
>>I'd be curious to know if anyone else has got it working.

>I will try it.

Any luck? At least two others have posted they haven't got it working,
either -- sounds like the same problem I had. Shame. It would be nice
if it automatically worked with both stacks like AWeb, AmFTP, AmIRC,
etc, do.

>Regards,
>                                Michael van Elst
>Internet: mlelstv@serpens.rhein.de

-- 
Jason S Birch                        ,-_|\ email: jasonb@cs.uwa.edu.au
Department of Computer Science      /     \ Tel (work): +61 9 380 1840
The University of Western Australia *_.-._/ Fax (work): +61 9 380 1089
Nedlands  W. Australia  6907             v  Tel (home): +61 9 386 8630