Tuesday, September 5, 2006 - Tue, 5 Sep 2006

During some e-mail communication with a fellow programmer/genealogist who tried Behold, he indicated that Behold is just too slow and unresponsive while loading. Unfortunately, I had to agree. All the features I have been adding over the last year have been making Behold slower and making it use more memory. I realize now that before I go any further, I have to do some basic tuning to make Behold speedier and let it allow Windows to process more often during its loading.

So I’ve rearranged my Future Plans page to do the speed up and related work first, and I’ll release a version when this is done. The other final set of features prior to the beta release will then be worked on.

Over the last couple of days, I first looked at the MyCompare routine that I talked about in this blog on August 25. It is within the internal data searching routine which Behold calls millions of times. I determined that I could remove it entirely, with the possibility that I may have to sort certain items just before printing them in the Everything Report.

So I removed the routine and found that the loading of Behold with a fairly large test GEDCOM I have went down from 27.09 seconds to 10.16 seconds. That’s a pretty good first step. Now I’ll go onto the next one.