Mellel very slow on Pismo

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D'Espice
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Mellel very slow on Pismo

Post by D'Espice »

First of all: For those of you who think they might be having a Déjà-vu, that's ok. I posted this once before, about a year ago I'd say, without any satisfying results. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find my old thread anymore - the search doesn't really help and, even though I have 33 posts already, it only returns five of'em. Whatever.


Anyway, here's the deal. Back in the days when I still had a Intel Core Solo Mac Mini I was very satisfied with Mellel's performance. It was snappy, it was responsive and in general, a pleasure to use. Sh*t hit the fan when I purchased a PowerBook G3 Wallstreet, installed OS X 10.3 and started using Mellel - it was slow. In fact it was so slow that using Word 2004 instead felt like a pleasure cruise across the pacific ocean. It wasn't exactly not the lack of "t3h snappy(tm)" that disturbed me (after using OS X for a couple of years I kinda got used to the fact that compared to both, Windows XP and Vista running on comparable or even slower hardware, OS X feels like a big fat slug sliming its way up a wall) but rather the fact, that when typing Mellel was fast at first yet the longer the paragraph got, the longer the lag between typing the letter on the keyboard and seeing the result on the screen was. For the first 5-10 lines it was ok, then it started to get slower and slower. When finally approaching 15-20 lines it was unsable - up to two seconds between pressing the key and seeing the result on screen are note acceptable. The interesting thing was that no matter how long the document was, whether it was a one-pager or an 80-pages master thesis, the effect was always the same. As soon as I started a new paragraph everything was fine again and snappy as usual, but it all started to crawl again starting with line 5-10. As for Word 2004 performance, see last paragraph.

OS X on the Wallstreet is long gone, I downgraded to OS 9 and MS Office 2001 (which, frankly, rather felt like an upgrade in terms of performance), and so is the Wallstreet itself. It has been 'promoted' to chief dust basement executive officer, and I got a nice Pismo (G3/400, 1.024MB of memory, 40gig harddrive) real cheap instead, running the latest supported version of OS X on that beauty: 10.4.9
And the problem I was having with Mellel - guess what, it still exists. The longer the paragraphs get, the worst it gets. I can't say whether it's exactly as bad as it was with the Wallstreet or any better or even worse. But it's definitely noticeable and really disturbing.

Back in the days a few people tried to help me and we came up with "maybe it's because the Wallstreet's video card isn't officially supported by 10.3". This does not seem to be an issue tho, since the Pismo's video card IS officially supported by OS X 10.4, and so is my girlfriend's iMac's G3 video card btw and we're having the same problem on her computer too. Once again I'm forced to write my articles, papers and everything else in Word 2004, which is a LOT faster than Mellel. It's responsive, it's kinda snappy and even with paragraphs spanning over more than one page, typing is still not lagging behind even a quarter of a second no matter whether said paragraph is on page one or on page 101.

So what's the deal? Any ideas what I could try to solve this problem? As it is, Mellel is unusable, yet I'd really prefer to do my work in Mellel rather than Word. Any hint and idea is welcome, no matter how stupid it may sound at first - feel free to go crazy!
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Post by macsailor »

I've got a Pismo (G3/500, 576MB of memory, 80gig harddrive) and I'm using the latest version of MacOS X (10.4.9). I do not find specifically Mellel to be that slow on my PowerBook.

I do feel that my Pismo is ready for a retirement any time now (it's nearly 8 years old by now), but I do not think that Mellel is the culprit to blame in the case my Pismo is to slow. Mellel is quite responsive, at least compared to some other of my applications like Mail, various internet browsers and so on. As far as I can tell, the culprit and the part to blame is the slow G3 processor. Pismo was not built to work with such powerful OS as MacOS X.

Hopefully, my next computer will be a MacBook Pro with the rumoured new display and flash memory instead of harddrive, but it depend on the reliability of the rumour and also what will be the price for this new dream machine. 8)
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Post by D'Espice »

To be honest, I'm very satisfied with my Pismo's performance. Given that 99% of its time is spent doing word processing it's kinda like a mobile typewriter for me.

I thought about a MacBook too, but then there's actually five reasons not to:

1. Price
Given the reasons below and the fact, that I could get a lot better hardware for the same money when NOT buying an Apple computer, I think what Apple charges for the MacBook is absurd.

2. Reliability
I keep reading about MacBooks failing, batteries dying, displays dying, cases breaking, etc. It's just not reliable enough for me to rely upon it for my daily work

3. Keyboard
I'd really like to meet the person at Apple who thought 'hey, so far our mobile keyboards have been amazingly great... let's f*ck up for once and design the worst keyboard of our life!'... I'd beat him/her unconscious with that new MacBook keyboard (or a spoon, depending on how stupid that person really is)

4. Display
Never ever am I going to purchase a laptop with a glossy display. If I want a picture of myself to look at I'd rather look in a mirror. I spend most my days at the library where it's very bright due to huge bottom to top windows everywhere. All I could see was myself... I thought I was very handsome, but that's not the point

5. Display
I know, I already did the dispay but there's actually two separate things about the display I don't like. 13" widescreen? WTF people, c'mon. Only because others are doing it and people seem to be stupid enough to fall for every trick that the marketing folks pull out of their a*s doesn't mean you have to do it to. If I'll find the person who's responsible for the 13" widescreen display I'll put him/her right next to the person responsible for the keyboard

MBP is not an option either, for two reasons: 15" is too big (plus it's widescreen, and I fssssng hate widescreen on laptops, it's just ridiculous), price is too high. I really hope Apple is going to release a 12" MacBook, 4:3, non-glossy display and usable keyboard. However I might not stand a chance of ever seeing one of those. I used to have a 12" iBook G4/1250 once but for some reason sold it... I guess I thought that it'd be better to sell it now, as long as there are no Intel-CPUs available in Apple's home user mobile line. Biiiig mistake I guess *shrug*
Whatever. I'm very satisfied with my Pismo and am going to keep it until Apple introduces something that fits my needs... whenever that may be

Can you do me a favor macsailor? Set Mellel's text zoom to 100% and create a paragraph that is about a page long. Then tell me whether you feel that it's getting sluggish when typing, especially compared to when you start a new paragraph right underneath.

PS: I don't really see why the CPU, that sits idle while I'm typing, should be the culprit here. When scrolling, it's the CPU. When moving windows, it's the CPU. But when typing the CPU has nothing else to do, that's why I don't think it's the CPUs fault. I'm rather thinking along the lines of video card maybe, don't know.

PPS: You know that something's seriously wrong when Word 2004 is actually faster than Mellel... think about it ;)
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Post by ptram »

I too use Mellel on a Pismo G3/400 with 512MB of RAM and Tiger 10.4.9 running on it. Frankly, I find Mellel rather snappy, when compared to other applications running on the same machine. I can write with it without feeling it is not following me. To be true, it's my preferred writing machine.

I can't see the reason of the problems with your setup. Maybe deleting Mellel's preferences might help? Be sure you have only Mellel open when working, or it will end up on virtual memory, and slow down very much.

Paolo
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Post by D'Espice »

ptram wrote:I can't see the reason of the problems with your setup. Maybe deleting Mellel's preferences might help? Be sure you have only Mellel open when working, or it will end up on virtual memory, and slow down very much.
That's completely out of question, since I need a couple of applications for my daily work. Currently, there are 13 applications running, which however arent's slowing down the computer a bit - thanks to a gig of memory I might add. And even if they would - once the data is read from the harddrive and written into the memory there should be no difference anymore.

Anyway, like I said, I can't have only Mellel open when working, that's impossible. Deleting the prefs also won't help since I just reinstalled 10.4 from scratch and Mellel has been showing this behavior on both, my Wallstreet and my Pismo, and also does the same thing on my girlfriend's iMac.
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Post by D'Espice »

It can't possibly be true that I'm the only one disturbed by this, can it?

Let's conduct an experiment: From my initial posting, copy the second, third and fourth paragraph (starting with 'Anyway, here's the deal', ending with 'noticeable and really disturbing'). Paste that into Mellel and delete the linebreaks in between, so you have one single paragraph containing all this text. Now place your cursor at the end of this paragraph, do NOT start a new one but simply keep typing, resulting in the paragraph getting even longer than it already is.
Does that lag behind or not? For me, it's completely unusable since the lag is somewhere between one and two seconds.

Now press Enter to start a new paragraph - notice any difference?
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Post by nicka »

Tried it. No discernable difference here, but then I'm using a 1.5 GHz PowerBook...

I have noticed that in a big document -- about 300 pages of plain text and auto-titles plus one or two tables, a few figures -- typing is irritatingly slightly too slow in the main body, but perfectly snappy in footnotes. I guess Mellel is constantly trying to figure out if adding a letter requires repagination all the way down the line.

I wouldn't mind, since it's not unworkably slow, and Mellel is a lot faster than (eg) Word 2004 with a file like this, but I've noticed that Mellel isn't throwing all of my Mac's resources at the problem. Activity Monitor reports that Mellel is using around 31% of CPU when I type, versus around 70% when I first open the 300 page document. I wonder if Mellel could be tweaked to be a bit more selfish with CPU time during typing...
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Post by nicka »

Oh, and by the way, I've also noticed that old threads on the forum seem inaccessible. There doesn't seem to be anything there before last September, specifically Sunday September 3rd 2006.

I hope the older stuff isn't permanently inaccessible, and I wonder if there is a time-horizon on this forum. ie do old posts drop off automatically? If so we might be better off with a wiki for the 'How do I do such-snd-such?' type of thread, since otherwise we have to post instructions each time the same question is asked, (as I have just done with a thread about unnumbered paragraphs in lists).
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Post by macsailor »

D'Espice wrote:Can you do me a favor macsailor? Set Mellel's text zoom to 100% and create a paragraph that is about a page long. Then tell me whether you feel that it's getting sluggish when typing, especially compared to when you start a new paragraph right underneath.
I tried what you asked me to do and I did not get any sluggish while typing. I believe that you may have got a Friday afternoon Pismo. :wink:
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Post by macsailor »

D'Espice wrote:It can't possibly be true that I'm the only one disturbed by this, can it?

Let's conduct an experiment: From my initial posting, copy the second, third and fourth paragraph (starting with 'Anyway, here's the deal', ending with 'noticeable and really disturbing'). Paste that into Mellel and delete the linebreaks in between, so you have one single paragraph containing all this text. Now place your cursor at the end of this paragraph, do NOT start a new one but simply keep typing, resulting in the paragraph getting even longer than it already is.
Does that lag behind or not? For me, it's completely unusable since the lag is somewhere between one and two seconds.

Now press Enter to start a new paragraph - notice any difference?
I did this experiment as well, but I did not notice any difference whatsoever. Mellel had the same speed and it was not sluggish at all.
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Post by matthias »

Just another thought on this: D'Espice, you are using the latest version of Mellel? That is 2.2.5. I think there was something about long documents slowing down in the bug fixes of this update.

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Post by D'Espice »

Yeah, it's all brand-new. Doesn't make a difference though, even tried Mellel 1.9 and had the same problem. It's noticeable and it's really disturbing. I don't know how fast you guys type, or maybe it's just me... but I'm getting really pissed off by the fact that I seem to be the only one.

Edit: I just noticed something: It does make a difference how much of that paragraph is displayed on-screen. Meaning: If I scroll down so that only, let's say four or five lines of my paragraph show on screen and the rest is outside of the visible area, typing is fast as it should be. However, if I can see the entire paragraph, all 20+ lines of it, then typing gets incredibly slow
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Post by Eyal Redler »

D'Espice,

If you're getting better results when most of the paragraph is hidden then the culprit is probably due to slow drawing rather then slow calculation of the text layout (which is the usual source of slowdown).
Did you try using a different font? How about different screen color depth settings? Do you see any difference in performance if you use the full screen mode? Does closing the palettes make any difference? Is Mellel the only application that's open?
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Post by D'Espice »

Eyal Redler wrote:D'Espice,

If you're getting better results when most of the paragraph is hidden then the culprit is probably due to slow drawing rather then slow calculation of the text layout (which is the usual source of slowdown).
Makes perfect sense...
Did you try using a different font? How about different screen color depth settings?
Tried both, nothing works. Actually it even got worse when I picked Trebuchet MS rather than my default font TNR. Arial seemed to be just as slow as TNR, haven't found anything faster than TNR yet - haven't tried all fonts though.
Screen color depth settings were actually the first culprit I could think of. I just tried again, setting color depth to 32k colors - absolutely no difference at all.
Do you see any difference in performance if you use the full screen mode?
Full screen mode did seem to improve performance a little bit. It's not yet perfect, but it's definitely a little bit faster than before
Does closing the palettes make any difference? Is Mellel the only application that's open?
Nope, neither does closing the palettes make any difference at all, nore is Mellel the only running application - I usually keep a bunch of applications that I need frequently while writing open in the background, including Mail, a webbrowser, dictionary, sometimes iChat, Powerpoint, a VPN-Client, iCal, etc. pp. I just tried closing all other apps, every single one of them except for Mellel - didn't make a difference at all. I even created a brand-new user, logout-login, started Mellel and created a long paragraph - same problem.


Slow drawing was what I thought of after all my experiments. I'm guessing that the video card is simply too slow... that doesn't explain however why it's snappy and fast in Word 2004 (the typing that is, everything else is obviously faster and snappier in Mellel). If Word or any other application would show similar effects I'd know that it'd finally be time to replace the Pismo. However, since Mellel is the only app that has ever done that to me I don't really think it's unfixable
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Post by rpcameron »

nicka wrote:Oh, and by the way, I've also noticed that old threads on the forum seem inaccessible. There doesn't seem to be anything there before last September, specifically Sunday September 3rd 2006.

I hope the older stuff isn't permanently inaccessible, and I wonder if there is a time-horizon on this forum. ie do old posts drop off automatically? If so we might be better off with a wiki for the 'How do I do such-snd-such?' type of thread, since otherwise we have to post instructions each time the same question is asked, (as I have just done with a thread about unnumbered paragraphs in lists).
Yes, all of the previous forum posts are inaccessible. This is because the forum was hacked, and the database for the forum was recreated. Similar posts may be found on the mailing list, though, which has a longer archive.
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