Freezing with big card lists in Card Editor (seems like run as Admin solved it!)

[Pyrefox]

Hey there!

Yesterday I downloaded the lastest version, because the previous one wasn't updating the Magic plugin card images correctly, but this new one seems to be doing that just fine.

However, when I was in Deck Editor, browsing cards, enabling and disabling filters, it started slowing the program down, and I often needed to wait several seconds to a minute because the program has gone "not responding". I didn't figure out what filters or actions were causing it to freeze.

Then it started crashing while I was simply trying to handle filters (enable, disable, change terms, etc), and now I literally can't use it. It freezes with anything I do, even changing tabs. The Deck Editor takes forever to load when I start Lackey, and anything I click either freezes the program or crashes it. Any ideas of what I could do? I just downloaded it, unzipped and copied the Magic plugin folder into the new one, then I deleted the last version.

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Edit: is there somewhere I can download older versions of Lackey? I'm having to browse in Gatherer, because Lackey is completely impossible to handle now.

[Trevor]

Is there anything you can do to deliberately cause a crash? Unless you give me something specific I can test, I can't really figure out what the problem is.

[Pyrefox]

I've been trying to deliberately cause a crash, but it doesn't happen.

What's happening now is:

I open Lackey and it takes a while to load deck editor.
I go into deck editor and try to use a Filter, but it takes a while to respond to my click on the Filter (almost 1 minute).

Then, if I try to click somewhere else, the program goes 'not responding' and after a while it comes back. If I click two or more places, it may not open the filter window for me to put down the terms, so I have to click again (and wait a lot again). D:

I don't know if there's any compatibility problem, or driver (if that's even possible in Lackey), but this OS (Win7) and drivers are exactly the same I used to run previous versions, and it worked just fine.

To me it seems it's a problem with the places you need to click that pop new windows, because after it opens and I put down the terms to filter, the list is quickly updated with what I asked.

I waited for everything in deck editor to load and took some time to test other Tabs, like preferences, server, etc, but it seems only the Deck Editor is causing slowness. At least it's not crashing anymore, but sometimes it goes "not responding" for a very long while (and I'm not sure if it will come back or not, so I end it with task manager).

[Trevor]

Try applying one of the deck filters. Does that speed it up? I wonder if the issue is related to the number cards in the deck editor.

[lotjx]

I am also getting a freezing issue. I downloaded the newest version and what is happening is I get  a message saying %DL of updatelist and nothing happens. When I try to go to a new plugin, it says wait while downloaded is in process. It freezes and crashes while I try to get on the server as well. It will also freeze and crash if I do the tutorial. Am I missing a file to connect to the serves

[Pyrefox]

Even when I wait for the program to get through the 'not responding' time, if I manage to put down a term to filter the list of cards into a smaller group, the filters are still taking a long while to respond to my click. It's not that it takes a while for the filter to get applied... the program stops doing anything when I click either the browse field (where I write the sentences or words I want to filter) or the X button to enable/disable each filter, even when nothing is written on the filter, and no matter what kind of filter it is (it stops responding after clicking Text, Name, Set, Power... etc; all of them freeze the program for a while) D:

[Pyrefox]

S'up Trevor!

I took some time (almost an hour of enabling and disabling filters, lol) to do a few more tests, this is what I came up with after testing:


1) When I first activate a Filter, it freezes for a long while. What I mean is, when the Filter is like this "Name contains" it takes a lot of time to unfreeze, because I still have the full list.

2) When the filter box finally opens, if I type nothing and hit "X" to close it, it freezes for a long while too. If I type something down and press enter, two things may happen: - it will freeze if the resulting card list is large; or it won't freeze if the resulting card list is small.

I tested this by searching cards with "Name contains 'none' ", and it was instantly loaded with only one card, that is "Orcish Cannoneers".
Then I tried Name filter "a", which obviously brings many cards (10399 to be more exact), and it did freeze for a long while.

3) If I have a filter already active and filtering the full list into a small list (like the Orcish Cannoneers example) and I click that same filter, it doesn't freeze. But if the filter is resulting in a large list (like the "contains a" example) it will freeze.

4) While testing the Name contains "none", I noticed when I changed it into "DOESN'T CONTAIN", it froze. I believe it is because the resulting list would be a large one.

5) Disabling a filter by unchecking it also makes it freeze, because the resulting list is a large one. The only time it seems not to happen is when I have two filters active, let's say NAME and COLOR. If one of these filters results in a small list, if I disable the other one, it will still end up in a small list, and won't freeze.

I tested this with "Name contains Elves". It resulted in a 9-card list. Then I filtered with "Text contains add", which never froze, because the actual list was small and the resulting list was also small. Disabling the Text filter, opening, changing its text, closing the filter options for that one, etc, never froze it, because the other filter was still keeping the list small. However, the instant I disabled the Name filter it froze, but only for a little while, because the "Text contains Add" was still keeping the list kinda small.

6) As "Ignoring doubles" is also a filter, it will freeze if the list is big, and it won't if it's small.


My conclusions to this are:

1) Everytime I click the filter field in order to make it open the box to type in what I want, it will remain frozen according to how big the resulting list is. That is probably because opening the filter box is making the program update the card list (even before I typed anything), which shouldn't happen... it only makes the program come up with the same list I already have, since I still didn't type anything or change my current search.

2) While I'm typing, it won't freeze. However, if I hit enter to apply what I wrote, it will freeze for a longer time as the resulting list is larger, or for a shorter time as the list is smaller. This means the program is taking time proportional to the resulting card list - different from previous versions of the program (the list loaded way faster and the filters responded immediately).

3) I tried enabling the option "Update Deck Editor filters on keystrokes". Just as I thought it would happen, it froze with everyletter I typed, until the word become too restrictive. "Name contains" - 'a' (froze - 10399 cards); 'as' (froze for a short while - 1282 cards); 'ast' (almost didn't freeze - 452 cards); 'aste' (almost instant - 166 cards); 'aste ' (adding the space ended in an instant search of only 6 cards).

4) The reason the Deck Editor is taking a long while to load when I open the program is because the first list of cards is the full list.

5) Crashing is never related to these frozen times, unless I try to hit 2385712580 buttons while it's frozen, which means windows ended the program instead of the program crashing itself - it seems safe enough.

6) Curiously, even if I disable all filters, uncheck "ignoring doubles" and uncheck "combine reprints", my list is at Total: 19835, Shown: 19700. I wonder why there are 135 cards never being shown. That may be a wrong count on the MTG plugin, but I have no idea what the plugin is made, I'm just speculating.

7) I doubt it's a permormance issue, because as I said, previous versions of the program never caused freezing or slowness (and the previous MTG plugin versions still had over 18k cards). I'm running on Windows 7 64bits (same OS I used last version), 16Gb Ram, Processor is an I5, and, just to make sure, I set the Performance Presets to "Low" on Lackey, and reduced the number of simultaneous cards imaged to 50 (instead of default 200), but it made no difference... Deck Editor continues to freeze on big card lists.

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That said, if the problem is detected as some incompatibility with what I'm running current Lackey version on, please tell me what I should change in my configs/drivers/whatever to make it not freeze when I'm browsing card on Deck Editor D:

[Alastair]

How are you running lackey Pyrefox? Have you attempted to run lackey as Administrator? I don't know that it'd help in this particular circumstance, but it's solved a whole slew of other problems I've experienced over the years.

[Trevor]

That's a good report. I am investigating this. I will get back to you ASAP.

[Pyrefox]

Restarted windows and went straight into testing this. I now tried running as Administrator now and it seemed to speed up considerably!

Considering the way it was before, I'd say it probably can't get any better. What was taking 20-30 seconds is now taking maybe 3-4. I'll continue to test it running as administrator, but it seems to have done the trick.

Is there a way I can configure Lackey, or windows, to always run Lackey as Administrator?

[Trevor]

Can you try not running it as administrator again and see if it gets slow again.

If it is indeed slowness caused by it not being run as administrator, I don't know what's causing that, or what I can do to fix it.

[Alastair]

Right click the exe, go to properties then go to Compatability and check the box that says Run this program as administrator. It'll still pop up the "Yes/No" prompt each time though.

UAC in Vista and 7 can be a rather fickle thing when it comes to what it allows a program to do. Even disabled it can cause odd behavior in some programs, lackey is obviously one of them. I don't know of any specific change Trevor could make that would solve this. A google search turns up a whole host of topics about UAC but no real answers on the situation. That's microsoft for ya.

[Pyrefox]

Ok, now I was also surprised... I ran it not as admin, and it is doing just fine.

1) I don't know if windows kinda "let Lackey do its things" because I ran as admin before;
2) If the problem was actually a windows problem that was solved since I last restarted (this may be the case).

I would say it might be one of thoses cases where if you install the program and DON'T RESTART, it gets laggy, and then, if you restart it works fine. However, Lackey was never installed... I just unpacked it out of a compacted file. I don't remember if last version was installed or unpacked... if it was installed, maybe Windows made a better identification of the new items that replaced the old installed ones after it restarted. I don't think we'll ever fully understand the miracles a restart does to Windows.

3) Another thing that may have caused it was the fact that I copied the plugin into the new Lackey folder and it only "settled" right after I restarted (but I don't even know if these things work like this).

4) My last attempt to guess what may have happened is to say the plugin itself was kinda buggy because I just copied it, and maybe some update made it work (like, fixed it), but I don't think the plugin was even updated after I copied it from the older version... unless it autoupdated without myself noticing it.


My final opinion is that it was Windows' fault, not Lackey's. Maybe you could write a suggestion in the download page,  telling people to restart Windows after unpacking Lackey, or after copying plugins used in old versions into the current one.