Help! Editor randomly lagging and freezing

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    Anyone else experiencing random lags in the editor? They are especially noticeable when working with events and expression. The editor starts to feel very sluggish for a minute or two for no apparent reason, then the problem goes away. This happens many times a day and is very annoying.

    The freezes can be very short or last up to 20 seconds! See the gif below - I started typing choose("armor"... and the editor froze for 16 seconds as soon as I typed the opening bracket! Chrome even popped up a message saying that the page is not responding.

    I tried monitoring CPU and memory utilization in Task Manager and didn't notice any spikes when these freezes happen. As a test I opened a youtube video in another browser and it continued to play smoothly during these freezes. So I'm sure that no other applications are responsible, the issue is definitely in C3 or Chrome. There are no any third party extensions installed in Chrome.

    I don't know if it's related to the project size or not. I've been only working on a large(ish) game lately - about 500 objects, 6000 events.

    My hardware specs: Ryzen 9 4900HS, 24GB of RAM, 1TB SSD.

    Tagged:

    I will try your suggestions, but don't think it's the same problem. When I type "(" or "." in the expression editor, I believe it's Construct engine that tries to check the syntax of the entered expression, change text color, display a drop-down list etc. It probably has nothing to do with Chrome autofill.

    Besides, the editor is lagging in other places too - when I click and try to move objects on the layout, when adding a new event or action to an event sheet etc.

    I've not seen any such issues and I use Construct a lot in my day-to-day work.

    I would say freezing for 20 seconds is not a performance problem, it's a fault - nothing should be taking that long, so I would suspect there is some kind of system fault going on.

    Random idea, but, if you use Chrome, could you try installing Chrome Canary (or if using Firefox, then Firefox Nightly), just to see if the issue happens in a freshly-installed browser?

    Does this happen in small/empty projects?

    This happened to me a month or so ago. It lasted about a week, and stopped just as I was trying to figure out the cause. I'm not sure what caused it to start or stop, but it was on chrome, and the project was medium sized and stored on dropbox. I hope it passes for you as well! (or the root is discovered)

    EDIT: Because of the mention of Windows Defender, this happened to me on a Mac

    Thanks, Ashley and everyone else for the replies! I installed a fresh version of Chrome Canary, didn't log in, didn't install any extensions. Unfortunately, about 30 minutes after opening my project the issue returned.

    I recorded a performance report in Chrome DevTools - one when the editor was lagging and another when not. Both times what I did was adding a simple action in the event sheet with a simple expression in it - Player.8direction.VectorX

    Although I don't understand what most of this means, the report clearly shows huge periods of latency when I typed the dot after "Player" or "8direction". In the section I highlighted there were hundreds of long removeChild calls. Similar calls are present in the report when there was no lagging, but they took a lot less time to process.

    If anyone wants to investigate, here are both reports. To load them, open DevTools in chrome and click "Load profile" icon in the Performance tab.

    I had a look at the profiles but unfortunately they're not very useful. It's all post-build mangling so the names are lost, and without steps to reproduce there's no way of testing if any changes I make help in any way either.

    As ever it's difficult to provide any help whatsoever without the information requested by the bug report guidelines - we really do need all that to be able to help. I still suspect this is some kind of fault though, especially if it's intermittent. If it happened consistently with the same inputs then if it was Construct somehow being slow, it would probably always be slow. If it's sometimes fast that would suggest to me that Construct is responding perfectly quickly but something else is sometimes unpredictably holding up the system.

    dop2000 do you have a third party antivirus installed or only windows defender?

    If you have a 3rd party give it a try without it.

    do you have a third party antivirus installed or only windows defender?

    No, only Windows Defender. I'll try disabling it tomorrow, see if it helps.

    Does this happen in small/empty projects?

    I don't know, to test this I will have to actively edit the project for a prolonged period of time - maybe 20 minutes, maybe an hour.. These periods of lagging are very random.

    As ever it's difficult to provide any help whatsoever without the information requested by the bug report guidelines.

    Thanks for checking those chrome profiles!

    I don't have any other information unfortunately. I understand there is probably something specific to my setup (maybe a combination of hardware or drivers), that is causing this issue. If I find a certain way to reproduce it, I'll log a bug report.

    Another unlikely idea, but perhaps computer temperature? Although this is unlikely as you do not experience issues elsewhere on your computer, but might be worth monitoring your temperatures when this issue next happens. I use Speccy for reading temperatures.

    If you have the patience and time, it could be worth dual booting into a 2nd instance of Windows and seeing if the issue continues - if it doesn't, then maybe reinstalling windows would be the easiest solution.

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    Another unlikely idea, but perhaps computer temperature?

    No, the laptop is running cold. And like I said other apps are not affected, the issue is isolated to C3 in Chrome only.

    Maybe it's a HD issue. Did you try running defrag and chkdsk?

    Try copying the project to a disk on key (or another HD if you got it) and see if it happens there too.

    Ahhh, at last, someone brings up this issue, thanks dop.

    I have this problem and its effect is proportional to the size of the project (in my experience)

    It's become so bad in larger projects that I've had to remove the majority of my global variables so they wouldn't fill in with the drop down list when typing.

    My Triggers:

    • If I have a lot of global variables
    • If I have a lot of objects
    • If I have a lot of instance variables for an object and I type the "." to access the objects expressions/attributes
    • If I use the action: Set group active and I have a lot of groups due to autofill dropdown list

    Basically anything that falls under increasing the count in the dropdown list seems to influence the frequency of this lag/freeze.

    I wish there was a way to modify the dropdown list, such as:

    • Only show the top (10,20,etc) results
    • Only show results if the length of the typed string is at least X characters long

    If I find some time, I might show a recording of just how slow this can get.

    Project I'm working on is large: 2500 objects, 15k events.

    If I open a new project it's smooth as butter for these operations.

    1StepCloser I know what you are talking about. C3 begins to lag when populating long lists of objects or expressions/variables. But these lags are relatively small, in largest projects I've seen the lags were about a second or two. It definitely doesn't explain random 10-20 second freezes in my case. They are probably related to the same functions, but something else makes the issue much worse.

    Maybe it's a HD issue. Did you try running defrag and chkdsk?

    It's unlikely. The drive is a fairly new very fast SSD. I don't have any issues running large modern games from it. Edit: I ran chkdsk and it didn't find any errors.

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