Big speed-up with graphic elements

[Alan H]

I am working on a database and have been very disappointed by the speeds I am seeing for browsing records. I finally found one of the sources.

The attached pdf is of a "Thumbnail" view that I created. This is done by a relationship between a global and a unique ID for each image. The page consists of 9 portals, each 4 rows high, which show an image. I can scroll this view by changing the global that defines the relationship (with a script, of course).

I have been very disturbed by update speeds in scrolling--about 25 secs for an 800MHz G4! I have investigated changing the portals and relationships, and was able to get some marginal speed-ups. But the biggest speed-up so far has been from changing the graphic elements on the screen (the 17x19 pixel icons). Originally these graphic elements were saved in PNG format, and were inserted on the layout by the Insert:Picture command. I changed them to global container variables, and pasted the images into the globals. (The globals need to be displayed as 19x21 pixels in FM7--which I think is a bug.)

Update in browse mode speed went from 25 secs to <2 secs--a 1000% speed-up! Also, changing from Browse to Layout mode was very slow--it is now fast. Scrolling might be even faster if I were to just have one graphic element and put invisible boxes over each part and attach them to the scripts.

Where FM7 is spending its time when it is drawing these graphic elements is a mystery to me.

DB Screenshot.pdf

[BruceJ]

Interesting. For the first time ever, I started making my buttons with Photoshop in PNG format (cool shadows and such). I"ve been concerend about speed - I haven't noticed anything yet - but I suppose if I do, I could either:

a.) Do away wuith the PNG graphics in favor of FMP native buttons

b.) As you did, use a BUNCH of global container fields and store them in there (What a pain though).

I'm going to keep my fingers crossed and hope I don't get the slow down!