I have 2 instantiations of vassal running, 2 different versions of vassal running from separate
terminal windows in Debian Linux running separate versions of java (3.5.8 vs. 3.2.17). I have about 4 different games running and leave them running for days on end while i play by email or in between online sessions with my opponents. I have an Intel I5 with 8 GB or ram and sufficient swap space to accomodate that and more. The processor is about a 2 GHz (oh, 1.something really).
What often happens, I keep the games minimized and only open them up for play once in a while. If it has been several days it seems to take many, many minutes to activate the game and resume computer operations for often, while it is bring the game back into memory (or whatever java / the jvm is doing) that game window is dead, no response to other mouse operations.
When I look at what processes and programs are running, I usually see many threads within the jvm running. So, I am speculating that java is the real culprit here, but exactly what it is doing I don’t know. Do I have to just live with this kind of lagginess, given the way I use my system? Or is there something inside VASSAL that could be done to reduce the amount of time spent waiting on its performance?
I’m mostly curious if this is something common and being looked at currently by VASSAL engine developers.
My second question (being a retired software developer), is, has the VASSAL engine code gone through any performance optimization rounds of developement ? Just curious.
Yes, several times over the years. E.g., new in 3.5.4 was the results of a major effort to eliminate duplicate or improperly retained objects.
The simplest solution might be to close your game and reopen it.
My guess is that what you’re seeing is Java’s heap being swapped back in to RAM after having been swapped out to disk. That’s likely to be slow, but it’s not due to anything in our code.
I suspected the swapping behavior is the most likely culprit, but thought I’d ask about VASSAL optimization, just out of curiosity.