workflow editor Laggy scrolling performance in large workflows

[Chris Messina]

Performance seems to be a tricky thing to diagnose, since it might be related to the individual's system specs or other configurations... but I believe I've noticed pretty consistently that larger workflows (i.e. with tens or hundreds of objects) has really choppy/jerky rendering performance when scrolling around. I expect the kind of dampening scroll effect in Apple Maps, but perhaps I'm comparing apples and oranges? 

 

I recorded what I'm seeing when scrolling around @vdesabou's epic Spotify Mini Player workflow here:

 

https://dropover.cloud/aac3de

 

Hopefully you can see that I'm just flick-scrolling up and down, but the viewport jerks and stops in a really abrupt manner. Is it possible to avoid this behavior?

[Andrew]

This lagginess will be down to the number of connections (bezier curves) being calculated for this complex workflow, and it is something which is fixable with caching and various other tricks. Having said that, this is something I won't be fixing for now as I intend to overhaul the workflow editor in a future major release, at which point, these performance issues will naturally be addressed.

 

Alfred only draws things which are visible within the viewport, so you'll notice even with very large workflows, if there isn't a mash of long bezier curves going into a single object (like in the Spotify one), the scrolling performance is normal.

[Chris Messina]

Got it, makes sense. I'm sure an overhaul of the editor is a major undertaking — it would be really cool if it looked and behaved similar to Quartz Composer, Origami's Patches system¹, or the Audio Hijack Audio Block configurator²... 

 

¹

² 

Edited January 6, 2021 by Chris Messina
add Audio Hijack