I was wondering if anyone has noticed a performance problem with pcb.
I have tried this on 3 or 4 versions already on a FC6 installation. I
even went all the way back to pcb-20060414 and found some strange
behaviour. I will describe my initial experiences with version
20060822 as this version (I think) is the one which saw a substantial
change in the UI (I'm sorry I do not have the time to read all the
release notes so please bear with me) as well as any newer versions
that I tried. In all cases I am running on a FC6 machine. Apart from
using yum to install v20070208, in all other cases, I compiled them
from source. In all cases -
1. The PCB Library window in earlier versions will display the list of
Elements in the right pane when I click on the library on the left
pane. However, when I select an element, the item is firstly not
highlighted (so you don't know if it has been selected) and then the
system will be unresponsive for up to 15-20 seconds and I will not see
the shadow outline of the element in the PCB window. When the system
returns from this strange state, I will be able to drop the part onto
the PCB. I notice that if I happen to move the move around or click on
the PCB window during this frozen state, the mouse movements and
clicks have all queued up in the event buffer and I will see my mouse
movements played back to me and parts placed on the PCB where I had
clicked.
2. In some versions before 20080202 e.g 20070912, the PCB Library
window will not allow me to select the library and will not list all
the parts in the library. In 20080202, I find I cannot select the
parts from the list in the right window and the system becomes
unresponsive for extended periods of time.
Sometimes I can select the part and drag it to the board, but the
system becomes unresponsive again. If I select a part from the "Load
element data to paste-buffer" menu item instead, the system will also
take a very long time to respond. Similarly with a lot of other other
operations such as selecting the part later and dragging it and
whatever else I tried (but cannot remember).
3. (This might not be a problem but it annoys me) When I quit the
application and as I am only testing I select to lose my data, the
application will still take about 10 seconds to quit.
You can imagine all this is very frustrating, so please excuse me for
not being very thorough in my investigation. I did find that I can
draw the traces and vias with no response problems in version
20060822. Same of version 20080202.
4. In version 20080202, I find that I when I click on the menu it does
not display the drop down box until a few seconds have elapsed.
I have not tried these and other operations in all versions. I simply
don't have the time as I really want to get some work done on Pcb. It
looks like I will have to use some other package for now.
As I said, I've compiled and tested on several versions - 20070208p1,
20070912, 20080202 etc by compiling the source. I also tried using
lesstif on one of the versions and discovered the same performance
issue. I even tried 3.0.95 which I believe is a completely separate
track and performance was as problematic as the other versions.
I've use various versions of pcb over the last 2 or 3 years and never
found a problem. I've not used the program in maybe 6 to 9 months and
in the meantime installed FC6. It's too late for me now to go back to
FC5 if it turns out that the problem is related to FC6, but somehow I
don't think so. I suspect that when a decision was made to change the
user interface, something has gone wrong.
In the past I've found Pcb to be very good and its got a much better
user interface than Osmond on OSX and kicad. It's also a lot easier to
learn and a person can become very productive in a matter of minutes.
I don't know if anyone else has this problem. Hope someone can take a
look at this.
Regards.
Stephen
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