Show Control - slow loading and 'not responding'

[Andy Middleton]

Hi All,
Does anyone else have to wait for a few minutes before the show control window shows?
Once the button is selected I just see a black box at the bottom of the screen and then 'not responding' message. After a few minutes it opens and works fine, although sometimes a touch button I have turned off continues to work.
When show control crashes or freezes in a working environment it seems ages waiting for it to re-start again.

It has been like this since I bought the software five years ago, and thought it was normal, but I was watching some vids of Dpro at the weekend and in those the show control opened immediately. Wow, I could do with that.

Is it my laptop or version?

I am using a Dell Inspiron 17, 7,000 64 bit, and have the latest version of Dpro.

Am I missing something?

Thank you

[Dave Brown [admin]]

When the Show Control window is opened, all the cues & cuelists are preloaded into memory. While this can take a bit of time for complex shows, it means that at showtime you get snappy, reliable response times when switching cues.

Keeping your dsf project files on fast solid state storage can improve load times enormously. If your laptop has a mechanical hard drive, then moving your .dsf files onto a USB memory stick would probably lower the load times.

[APT Tech]

I definitely don't see times of "A few minutes" when opening - maybe 20 seconds if it's a pretty complex show? I'm using a Mac Mini (dual-core i7, 16GB RAM, latest OS) but it does have SSD.

The computer is dedicated to lighting, we control it from another Mac using OSC.

[Andy Middleton]

OK, thank you for the quick replies
My laptop does have SSD, though only in the last six months as my hard drive failed, but I take your point regarding complex shows.
Every light show / gig I have programmed for are still kept on tabs in show control, so I assume all of these are being loaded each time.
I will take the risk and delete older shows no longer relevant and see if that improves the speed.
Cheers

[Dave Brown [admin]]

...Every light show / gig I have programmed for are still kept on tabs in show control

I imagine that's the problem. Every tab is pre-loaded into memory simultaneously. It's generally better to use a separate .dsf file for each gig.

[Andy Middleton]

Hi Dave,
Makes sense.
I have been keeping two or three songs on each tab and as songs list increases adding more tabs.
Is it possible to delete the whole tab or do i have to delete each cue and then reduce number of tabs
Thank you

[Dave Brown [admin]]

You have to first delete the button contents, then change the number of tabs in the Preferences window.

For speed you can shift-click the buttons in config mode and delete them in one action.

Note that you cannot delete specific tabs, you can only change the total number of tabs.

[Andy Middleton]

OK thank you for your support

[APT Tech]

What we’ve done is create a template DSF file that we use to start each show. The template has all of our fixtures in it, and any effects that we tend to use quite a lot. But then we build each show from that, and then delete the show (or archive it) when we’re done with it. Then we go back to the original template, it saves us from having to do all the deletes.

[Andy Middleton]

That is a good way of doing it thank you. I did delete everything but still have a back up of all the songs/shows so if need be I can back to the earlier version. Thank you for all your comments and advice. It has been very informative and helpful