Extremely slow UI refresh

[Thomas An]

Hi all,

Filemaker 9 flickers a lot while minimizing windows and it takes a while to select tables.

On a brand new database with a single table ... when I open the Manager (the table chart-view) and click on a table, I can literally watch it GROW the orange glowing highlight rectangle. It draws it in slow motion starting from the inside perimeter and then adding progressively more transparent rectangles to form a gradient.

Has anyone else experienced something like this ?

This is what it looks like on a default template file:

http://home.comcast.net/~doehtal-rx8/FileMakerFlicker/FilemakerFlicker.htm

Is this normal ?

Personally, I don't think I can work like this; especially in the "Manage Database" window, which flickers too when minimizing other applications. My actual working database has a little less than a hundred tables ... can you imagine filemaker trying to refresh all those ... and then DO IT OVER three times at least to complete its flicker cycle every time ?

Edited March 14, 2008 by Guest

[Vaughan]

Stuff like this is usually related to video card acceleration. In the WindOS Control Panel for display settings, turn the hardware acceleration down until it goes away. (Better yet, start with acceleration off and slowly increase it until the problem re-appears.)

[Thomas An]

Thanks, I will look into it ... although, with these newer nVidia drivers, there is no longer any "Hardware acceleration" slider per-se. There is a "Performance vs Quality" slider, but it does not have any effect on the particular FM flicker issue.

I will look furhter.

[Thomas An]

Vaughan !

I was able to find the hardware acceleration slider (it was in the "troubleshoot" menu, while I was looking all over the place in the nVidia control panel).

Yes, you were correct. When I move the slider all the way to "none" Filemaker performance increases dramatically.

To anyone else having the same problems ... these are the settings that worked for me.

Judging by the description on that slider, it seems the only difference between the two settings is the DirectDraw and Direct3d. So these two accelerations may have a conflict with Filemaker ?

[Søren Dyhr]

Might or mightn't .... blaming hardware and software, is a daft gesture, when it's obvious that you haven't developed much filemaker yet ... your relational structure are giving you away!

Tearing filemaker out of it realm doesn't really help - Your relational structure are strikingly spreadsheet'ish, the way of breaking stuff out into separate tables to avoid the use of chained dependencies with calc'fields relying on the evaluation of yet other calc'fields take much departure from the spreadsheet realm, have not even been considered at all - not every calc needs to get rendered with equal priority.

Calendaring should in my humble opinion be structured much much more consequently by a relational structure.

http://www.fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/176396/post/204083/hl//fromsearch/1/

What makes you think you should be exempt from common approaches, that just about any brew would do?? You should put much more care into choosing the right tables with fields contents to facilitate what you're after.

--sd

[Jor-El]

FileMaker does flicker quite a bit and it has nothing to do with graphics cards, but this is too much. You might have anti-virus software running a scan, maybe some triggered script misconfiguration.

[Lowell House]

Thank you so much! This worked like a charm!

I was upgraded to a new computer, and the database I'd been using all year suddenly was flickering all over the place. I could only get it to stop by moving the window around.

Glad to see there was an easy solution!

Vaughan !

I was able to find the hardware acceleration slider (it was in the "troubleshoot" menu, while I was looking all over the place in the nVidia control panel).

Yes, you were correct. When I move the slider all the way to "none" Filemaker performance increases dramatically.

To anyone else having the same problems ... these are the settings that worked for me.

Judging by the description on that slider, it seems the only difference between the two settings is the DirectDraw and Direct3d. So these two accelerations may have a conflict with Filemaker ?

[mfrapp]

I used to have very sluggish refresh in the relational graphic window, moving a occurence would take forever and i often get 10 refreshs of the whole graph just after a modification, upgrading my nvidia drivers got rid of the problem and now its very fast, but a new problem occurs now on layouts with .gif or .png in with transparent part renders white on the layout.

its not a relational structure problem, its a FileMaker problem

[Søren Dyhr]

but a new problem occurs now on layouts with .gif or .png in with transparent part renders white on the layout.

And you have noticed what is said here:

...here pull the slider to 3:39 - because it's a very crucial point he makes! But why not watch the entire video? I believe it's a developer habit/ignorance problem, if it's a filemaker problem at all, where vectorized graphics is the preferred format.

--sd