EA works slowly

[novikovigor]

Hello!
My EA is very slow when I'm working with huge diagrams. I've changed renderer to basic, but it didn't help me.
Is there any way to make EA faster?

This is my system:
W7 x64
i3 2x2,93
8GB RAM

[Geert Bellekens]

Yes, don't work with huge diagrams.

Geert

[rothnic]

I submitted a bug report a while back on this. The issue that I see is EA puts all 2d graphics processing on a single cpu processor thread. So matter how good your system is, how much ram you have, you will start to feel it pretty quickly with any even moderately sized diagrams. Note: I experienced this with IBDs, aka composite diagrams.

I found that an 11x17 sized network-ish diagram quickly became difficult to work with depending on the amount of labels.

No telling if it is on the radar for an upcoming update/release, but for now our organization is stuck with visio for that type of artifact.

[qwerty]

A general advice (not EA depend): do not use large diagrams, try to split it into sub-domains. You can create an overview diagram by dragging the sub-domain diagrams on one large diagram. So you work on the small ones and still can print the big one without much effort.

q.

[rothnic]

Absolutely agree about breaking up diagrams into smaller contexts. We were trying to transition some artifacts from visio to EA, and it would have caused less confusion and heartache if it could have been directly converted. Also, sometimes you may have issues that a given contract was negotiated assuming the traditional artifact format and costed per diagram. So while a good modeling technique, there can be issues during transition from traditional to model based systems engineering in our case.

However, good modeling approaches are independent of the fact that moving boxes and lines around on a diagram should not be resource intensive tasks, and for the most part shouldn't be reactive to the number of items on a diagram. Many products can do this without issue.

Saying, "don't do it that way" would be ignoring the issue and making the assumption that there isn't a valid use. I'd imagine it would be quite difficult to anticipate every way a customer would use the product.

As for diagram references, I've found that even using these you can get to the point of poor performance scrolling around (using them for my powerpoint exporter tool). Also, to make these more useful, you really need the ability to resize them.

[qwerty]

I fully agree to the fact that poor programming (as used for the EA rendering) is not an argument for using small diagrams

q.

[novikovigor]

Thanks to everyone!
But I have to use huge diagrams, because they are result of transformation of small diagrams, where objects and connectors are splitted. And it is normal for our business that they are huge, but my problem still exists.
So I have to spend a lot of time to "prettify" new diagrams after transformation, because EA works very slowly, especially in cases when there are a lot of connectors (objects' influence is not so strong).

Thanks again!
Sorry for my English.

[qwerty]

You should also send a bug report to put more weight into this one. No idea if it will help to speed things up (I mean the development cycle as well as the result itself), but without there will definitely not be any progress.

(Your English is perfect btw.)

q.

[rothnic]

Yeah, that would be good, since last I remember from my correspondence with Sparx over email, they didn't understand why the issue was occurring. It might also help if you have an example of what you were doing, or a model file that you know exhibits the problem and what you see in regard to resource usage on your computer.

Also, reference this thread, and my thread if you think it is related at all: http://www.sparxsystems.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?num=1372109159

I posted some task manager screenshots and an example file in that thread.