[OS X TeX] Extremely slow editing behavior with TeXShop

[Richard Seguin]

James,

This is the same behavior that I used to have on an old G4 Powerbook  
running at 550 MHz with no L2 cache. I never figured out what the  
problem was, but thought that it might have something to do with the  
absence of the L2 cache. I was having the same problem with BBEdit.  
I'm using a 2007 MacBook Pro now, and I'm not experiencing any  
slowness at all.

Richard Séguin

On Jun 21, 2008, at 7:12 PM, James Crippen wrote:

> I'm using TeXShop 2.15 (downloaded from Richard Koch's personal site)
> on Mac OS X 10.5.3, on a MacBook Pro.
>
> The problem I'm having is that the TeXShop editor window becomes
> unreasonably slow when working on long documents. I broke my Tlingit
> grammar (http://www2.hawaii.edu/~crippen/papers/tlingit-gram.pdf) into
> separate files for each chapter to try and help with this.
> Nevertheless, the verb chapter is still 289 kB in size, with 5920
> lines, 37k words, and 279k Unicode characters. This doesn't happen
> with smaller documents in TeXShop. Smultron and TextEdit don't have a
> problem with files this large, it's just TeXShop which is misbehaving.
>
> I have a CPU meter running which shows that every keypress causes
> significant CPU usage, on the order of 30% or more, sometimes up to
> 50% with rapid typing. The response time is so slow that I can usually
> type five or six letters before they appear on the screen in a short
> burst. There's a definite lag of nearly a second from when I type a
> single letter and when it appears on screen. Quitting and restarting
> TeXShop doesn't fix the problem, it reoccurs only a few keystrokes
> after I start editing in a new session. It doesn't matter what font I
> use for the editor window, although I usually use Lucida Grande at 12
> pt.
>
> I've tried fiddling with the ReleaseDocumentClasses preference, and
> with the ReleaseDocumentOnLeopard preference. None of the possible
> combinations of settings for either of these has any appreciable
> effect. I thought that it might be syntax highlighting, so I turned
> that off, but it didn't help. I tried to turn off paren matching, but
> this apparently can't be disabled despite the setting in the
> preference pane.
>
> I'd be willing to do a trace of the application while I'm working on
> this to help find the culprit for slowness, but I'm not knowledgeable
> enough about Objective C and Cocoa programming to fix the problem
> myself.
>
> Help!
> James Crippen
>
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