High resource usage and freezing with `syntect` plugin about xi-mac

[troplin]

No particularly long lines, all between about 80-150 characters.

[trishume]

I think the problem is that the highlighting protocol is currently very dumb and tries to send the entire text of the file as JSON to the syntect plugin synchronously. This hangs the core process and the plugin.

The plan is to fix this at some point by implementing this incremental highlighting and caching method.

[cmyr]

This might be a good argument to not be running any plugins at startup. That was really more a proof-of-concept anyway, happy to pull for now.

[troplin]

If that's the case I wonder why it's the XiEditor process that consumes all the resources, not xi-core or xi-syntect-plugin. At least that's what ActivityMonitor says.

[cmyr]

Do these files contain any really long lines? This could be #20.

[cmyr]

okay, this memory usage does seem to be linked to json updates initiated by syntect. This stuff is about to get touched as part of other work, I'm tempted to just move back to disabling all plugins by default but at the same time it isn't like xi-mac is a usable editor at this point anyway.

[cmyr]

@troplin Still a little curious about the non-responsive UI, though, which I couldn't reproduce. What hardware are you running? Is it possible that Xi's memory usage is pushing you against system memory limits? If that isn't the case, could you check that this still happens when the file is on a local drive?

Is this run through Xcode or stand-alone?

Is this a release build or a debug build?

Is this (current) master/master?

[troplin]

My hardware:

• iMac Early 2009
• 2.93 GHz Core 2 Duo
• 4GB RAM

I have to say that my system behaves a bit strange from time to time. The OS has been updated many times without a clean install for a long time.
Im not sure if that's just the new OS on an old machine or if there's something wrong somewhere.

I'm running it standalone, current master, release build.
The effect is the same if the file is on a local drive.

And I still find it very strange, that the front end is affected much more than the back end and the plugin itself:

And yes, I know that xi-mac is not yet very usable, but then again, there are not that many good free editors for mac at all and even less that can handle really big files.

[cmyr]

@troplin I'd be curious to hear what your experience is like now, performance-wise. We've just finished a bunch of work that should be a significant improvement.

[troplin]

I'd love to but I'm stuck on OS X El Capitan (10.11.6) and thus XCode 8.2.1.
xi-mac now to requires XCode 9.x so I cannot build it anymore.

[jansol]

(Needs some concrete resource usage numbers from various kinds of files)

[cmyr]

I think this was mostly resolved in xi-editor/xi-editor#453. Would accept a new issue for any specific follow-up.