Why is it so slow when editing files?

[draco]

Whenever I try to edit the files it stalls for a couple minutes then types whatever I entered. If I try to type again it takes the same amount of time for it to show on the screen. The files I'm comparing are about 3500 lines of code and are .cs files. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

[jeffhostetler]

DiffMerge is recomputing the entire diff after each edit so that you have a "live diff". (As opposed to only rediffing when you ask it to.) Usually this only causes a performance problem when you have very large files or files with low relative correlation.

As an experiment, try setting the Detail Level to "Lines Only" in the Options dialog. This will turn off the intra-line analysis/highlight and should greatly speed things up.

j

[gcranston]

How do I disable the re-diff after each edit? This is killing me. For my files it takes 2-3 seconds to apply each change, or for EACH CHARACTER while manually typing in the right hand file.

Thanks,

[jeffhostetler]

Sorry, but we don't have an option to turn that off.
It always does a live-diff as you type. And yes, it can
get draggy. I hope to be able to add that capability,
but I don't have a way to do it today.

Sorry,
jeff

[gcranston]

Sorry, but we don't have an option to turn that off.
It always does a live-diff as you type. And yes, it can
get draggy. I hope to be able to add that capability,
but I don't have a way to do it today.

Sorry,
jeff

"it can get draggy"? I was comparing two versions of a 25000 line file with only ~300 changes and it was unmanageable. I wound up making the changes in a text editor and reloading the edited files in DiffMerge and continuing. Some of our analysis input and output files reach millions of lines. I've seen numerous references on this board to DiffMerge not handling large files well, and it seems that there is enough demand to improve performance for large files.

[jeffhostetler]

Understood. But again, I don't have a way to turn this off right now.
It is on my list, but my queue is pretty long right now. I'm not trying
to disregard/dismiss this -- it irks me too when I'm doing a merge --
rather I'm just saying that I won't be able to address this for quite
a while.

As I mentioned earlier in this thread, you can try dialing-back the
analysis and turn off the intra-line/character stuff and make it a
little "less slow/glacial" and see if that helps.

But the real problem is that DiffMerge, while it does support a limited
amount of interactive editing, it was primarily intended to be used to
apply patches between panels. Just enough interactive editing support
was added to let you take care of the rough edges (using the same
edit-and-recompute model). It wasn't really intended to be used as
an editor first and foremost.

Sorry
jeff

[gcranston]

Thanks. I look forward to the update.