The applet seems very sluggish today and as practice goes on I thing its burning a higher and higher % of cpu. (Got up to 50% when I killed it, started back at 10%, now its up to 20% again)

Is this happening to anybody else?

(Using chrome on linux)

That's because I was studying too hard, sorry. ;)

This is weird; is anyone else seeing something like this? I haven't changed much related to this lately, but something could have been tweaked.

Seems no problem today on same computer. Strange.

sSorry to revive this - but I've been having the same problem on and off as well for the past 3 days. Sometimes the applet takes up 40-60% of my cpu and I have to shut it down, even when I delete background stuff (skype, msn... etc.). Sometimes the problem disappears. Last morning, it was only taking up 10%, strange indeed.

Judee, does it start taking up a high amount of CPU as soon as you start practicing, or does it build up to it? What browser and operating system are you running? Are you practicing everything, a list, a section, scratchpad? Thanks!

I don't know what an applet is but...

I have seen sluggishness the last 2 or 3 days, too. It's not the downloading, when I check the indicator at the bottom of the window it's always green.

I notice it when I finish one prompt and the next comes up. The window erases, the timer starts counting but there's no prompt displayed, nothing on the right half of the practice screen. It's often a short but noticeable lag, but sometimes up to 8 or 10 seconds, once I saw 15 seconds count up before the prompt appeared.

This is on a netbook using Chrome on Windows xp with nothing else running. Using practice everything. It's not just at startup although I cannot say how long it's been running since I generally leave this computer on and ready for skritter most anytime.

PS. Just now I studied for a while, half hour maybe, and saw none of this but it just started. I found I could write before the prompt appeared and the squigs are accepted - in the case of a 2 char word where I already knew the second character even though the right half is blank, there's no prompt.

sarac, when this happens, is the writing choppy, or is there just this weird delay before the prompt side of things comes up, without other symptoms?

Just a delay before the prompt shows up. It may just be this computer, though, since just in the last 2 days my bamboo has seemed unresponsive a couple of times so I looked at CPU usage. Only chrome is running with skritter and it is inexplicably using 50% if the CPU when it appears nothing is happening. If I close chrome and return it's fine.

When this is happening, can you press Shift+Esc in Chrome and see if it's Flash that's taking the CPU or the current page (JavaScript)? Thanks!

Okay, just had that happen. I am doing nothing (between skritter prompts) but CPU usage is 40 to 50%, flash is taking 40 to 40%. Hope that helps.

oops flash taking 30 to 40%

Can you keep track of which words (and which type of prompts) show up next, after these big delays? There might be a pattern!

The applet has become virtually unusable. I literally cant use it at the moment. I wonder if it has to do with the recent flash upgrade that I finally allowed Firefox to force me to install on my mac.

Hmm. If possible, can you try to revert to an older Flash version for comparison? You might be onto something. What version are you on now?
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/155/tn_15507.html

I don't know if this is helpful... still on the netbook, windows xp, chrome only running with task manager stuff, too.
I haven't seen the lagging behavior (not seeing the prompt when a char is done and the window erased) I described above but I've left the task manager up anyway. For reading prompts (type in the pinyin), flash is low, CPU usage low, good.
In contrast, for both writing and tone I see a different pattern: single digits after the prompt, before I've done anything, then 30's to 40's while I'm writing, and continuing when I'm done and the proper character is nicely written on top of my scribbles (I use raw squigs). Seems like there's nothing for flash to do... nothing to wait for since there's no new char, nothing to write, so what's it doing?
This isn't at all precise but I think that when I'm actually writing, I see 30's, when I'm done I see 40's.
I restarted Chrome, same thing; restarted the computer, same thing.

forgot to write: for those writing or tone prompts, after one is complete and I click to move to the next prompt, CPU usage drops to single digits again.

sarac, that's because of the filters that are applied to the finished character. I've tested these so that they don't slow things down, but they will use a bit more CPU. If they actually lowered the framerate significantly, I could add code to turn them off when that happened.

Is anyone still seeing sluggish Flash performance, and if so, which platforms and Flash versions are you using? How long has it been happening? Thanks!

Sorry I'm late to the party. I've noticed for a while now that Skritter is much more sluggish in Chrome and Firefox than Safari on my Macbook. It looks like everybody above is using Chrome or Firefox.

Hope that helps. I've just been using Safari when I need Skritter so its no big deal for me.

I'm using a 2.2Ghz white MacBook running snow leopard. Chrome 10.x, flash 10.2.154.25

Hey Marquis, thanks for the tip. I've been using Safari for Skritter for the past couple weeks, too, and I'm agreeing with you. I don't know why, but Safari runs Skritter a lot better on Mac.

The best browser on mac by a long long way is version 4 of Chronium/SWIron/Chrome. By a very long way.