Hi all, The last few days I was troubleshooting a new performance issue that showed up in our PROD application where customers had fallen back to the SW rendering pipeline. It severely affected the application where CPU frequency was under 3 GHz with hover lags of a few seconds in the worst cases. With thousands of potential HW/SW combinations in the wild it took quite a while to even identify it really was an issue in our application and not the usual noise of some silly set up. All this got me thinking...
... what was visible was long paint passes, and long waiting on previous render but narrowing this down to exactly what was going on took a lot of manual inspection of the rendering pipeline code / debugging and somewhat by chance I stumbled over the -Dprism.disableEffects flag which after much more pain helped me narrow down the issue. The root cause turned out to be an -fx-effect (blend, inner shadow) on an animated node that was set from the code by an unknowing developer. While there are tools like mission controller for visualising the pulse and phases it can be difficult to identify for example what is going wrong inside of the painting phase and it is difficult to control that nothing bad happens when many developers can make changes to the code and reviews will never catch everything... I'm therefore thinking about ways to run rendering tests in continuous integration that would fail fast if the SW rendering pipeline would get overloaded. I had a look at PulseListener where I could see pulse times but I'd like to go more detailed and actually like the information tracked in the internals of PulseLogger (PulseData) without doing any nasty tricks. I thought maybe somebody has already thought about this problem before and maybe there is even some tooling around this beyond the logging? I could even imagine using the same technique to monitor the rendering pipeline in real time and alerting us (maybe even the user) if things are going a bit sideways. Maybe more generically, how do you even start to debug delays in the paint phase? Timed breakpoints and IDE assisted debug logging aside. :) Matt. PS: It might even be nice to tell the Painter to give up after N ms (prism setting?). Sometimes better to break than to not be useable because of paint phases taking 200-300 ms and JavaFX Application Thread thread getting almost starved completely.
