No. 443

Improve Speed of Displaying Menus on the Windows Platform

IWBNI the speed at which menus are displayed in Finale on the Windows platform could be improved. As it is now, menus are displayed slowly when plug-ins are included, especially in the case when there is an open document.

To measure the speed at which menus are displayed, the following test was performed:

  1. Close all programs.
  2. Run Finale.
  3. Click Help in the Finale menu bar to display the help menu.
  4. Press and hold the right arrow key for 1 minute and count the number of cycles through which all menus are displayed.
The following results were obtained for various conditions:
 
Plug-ins That Were Included Number of Cycles per Minute
No Documents Open Default Document Open
No Plug-ins 131 125
All plug-ins distributed with Finale 2000b 115 96
All plug-ins distributed with Finale 2000b and the third-party plug-in TGTools 1.64d for Finale 2000 by Tobias Giesen 108 52

Analysis

The best performance was obtained with no plug-ins and no documents open (131 cycles). The worst performance was obtained by including all plug-ins that are distributed with Finale and TGTools while having a document open (52 cycles). The reduced performance is primarily due to the amount of time that it takes to display the Plug-ins menu.

Additional Information

In the "No Plug-ins" case, the plug-ins directory was deleted prior to running Finale.

During these tests, the Tools menu was included in the menu bar.

Tests were performed on a Pentium 200 with Finale 2000b running on Windows 98 (second release).



Created: April 8, 2000 (based on comments by Tobias Giesen)
Last Updated: April 8, 2000
Version: Finale 2000b