Hello James,

The docking example in the Showcase is a bit slow due to it being hosted in several layers of window/navigation page.

In a real world RIA, you would want to run the desktop and dock directly as the root of the visual. In that case, the performance would be optimal.

You can check our labs sample here: http://labs.clientui.com/mydesktopria

Let me know how you feel about the performance in the above labs sample.

Hope this helps,
Jimmy.

Thanks Jimmy, I tried your link... it ran almost identically to how it runs when I create a new application from the desktop template.  when pulling windows around (on a new project on my comp) the framerate drops to 15-20fps, and when moving the mouse over the UXDock my cpu usage spikes into the 90's and the framerate drops to 5-9 fps.  I even built a completely blank project and dropped a UXDock component into it, added a few buttons and had similar results (though the low end with JUST a UXDock was closer to 9 fps than the 5 fps i get in a new desktop app.  

I have seen similar performance issues with SL in other apps but this is the biggest hit I have taken on just simple interface animation.  I know the bottleneck is the cpu, SL does software rendering and I can watch my cpu meters spike to the roof when it slows down.  I just cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to improve it.. I have tried enabling gpu acceleration with various testing and no matter what level of the tree I apply the acceleration to, it does not seem to help.  

To make matters more interesting, our UI artist built a similar mac style bubble toolbar component and it runs with outstanding performance. (though it of course has none of the support you guys have built into your controls, it is just an animated bar with mouse over and click events).  Is there possibly something with the extra stuff your UXDock is doing for the framework support that might be affecting it on lower end machines?  And that might be true, can you think of anything that I can change to get it to run better  on dual core systems?

Have you guys, to your knowledge, gotten descent performance with the desktop template from a machine that has similar hardware to what I am running?  (dual core 3.0GHz, 3GB RAM, 256MB GeForce 7800 video).

Thanks again.

James, thank you for your detailed information.

I've checked your performance report with our engineers and unable to replicate the performance issue that you're seeing.

According to our test using the debugging mode from Silverlight, the frame rate is still between 15-20 fps.

If the frame rate is around 5 fps, the performance is certainly too slow and not acceptable.

Could you provide us more information to replicate the 5fps performance issue? Maybe a video that shows how you measure the performance would be helpful.

Regards,
Jimmy

I have recently made an interesting discovery through various testing concerning this performance issue and I believe that I can safely say it has nothing to do with your suite nor, Silverlight’s overall capabilities as a whole.  In fact it is looking very much like a compatibility issue or configuration issue.

On a whim, I loaded my test application, your guys desktop demo application, and the main application that I am working on, all on an 8 year old, single core 2GHz, 2GB RAM, 128 MB video card laptop... and they ran perfectly!  No choppy animations, no laggy input... everything ran great.  To further test this I put it on my Toshiba Tablet pc, (Dual Core 2GHz, 2GB RAM, 256MB integrated / shared video, and it ran even better than the first laptop.  I then went home and ran the same samples on my home computer, Dual Core 3.1 GHz, 4GB RAM, 1GB ATI 5850 Video, and it ran like crap, just as it does with all of the desktop pc's at my office.  So I further tested it by going to a friend’s house and trying it out on all 4 of his computers, 3 desktops (his, his sons, and his wife’s) and 1 laptop.  The laptop and his wife’s computers ran it perfectly, yet his and his sons machines were choppy and unusable.

The only thing that I have been able to identify so far as a "consistent difference" is that each of the computers that ran it fine, also had no silverlight plugins installed on them prior to the testing and the plugin was installed when i first went to your desktop gallery.  However uninstalling previous versions of silverlight and letting your site trigger the install again did not fix the issue on the machines that are having the performance issue.  

The only thing I can determine thus far are:

1. It is not a hardware issue, the apps were testing on many various machines of all sorts of hardware grade levels and the results were extremely inconsistent, some low end machines ran it superbly, some like crap, while the same held true for the more powerful machines, some ran great, some like crap.

2. It is not a direct capabilities limitation in silverlight, as it ran very well on some very low end machines during the testing.

3. It is not a bug in the ClientUI suite, as once again, there were several computers in the testing that ran it very well, and the same issue was present on other SL apps that did not use ClientUI, with the same results, they ran well on the computers which ran the ClientUI sample well, and poorly on the ones which ran ClientUI sample poorly.

I honestly have no idea what could be the different on this many machines that would cause it, the only consistency I have seen so far is that the ones which ran it well, all installed silverlight for the first time when I tested them.  I am going to do a few more tests on clean machines and see if that holds true.  If so, I will need to dig deeper than the normal uninstall for lingering libraries which might remain loaded and such (since uninstalling and reinstalling silverlight did not fix it on the machines which ran poorly).  If i come across anything I will definitely post it here.

Also if anyone has some feedback on what might be causing silverlight in general to run great on some machines, and really poorly on others with complete disregard to the quality of the hardware in the machines, I would GREATLY appreciate the feedback on it.

Thanks

Hello James,

Thank you for getting back to us regarding this matter with detailed information. Your discovery is extremely valuable for us, at least, now we know that it has nothing to do with our ClientUI controls.

I will contact the Microsoft Silverlight development team to see if they are aware of such issue. From our own QA team, we never encounter this weird performance inconsistent problem.

I'm suspecting that the "debugging" mode is somehow turned on in those PCs that run the Silverlight poorly. However, this needs further investigation. I will get back to you if I heard anything from MSFT.

Regards,
Jimmy

I'm suspecting that the "debugging" mode is somehow turned on in those PCs that run the Silverlight poorly.

Could you please elaborate on this a bit?  Is there some sort of setting per machine that determines this that I am unaware of?  The testing with various machines took place on a web server, the client machines just connected to it for testing, (your own demo site for desktopdock was one of the test pages i used, as well as my own), so all machines (the ones which ran it poorly and the ones which ran it good) were using the same website, and therefore the same build (which was a published build). 

If there are other settings that could determine this "debugging mode" per client, then please fill me in on the details as I have never heard of this before and if such a setting does exist it could very well be worth checking into.

Thanks.

Note: I have done various testing over the weekend completely removeing everythign that has to do with silverlight, development wise and browser plugins, and let the sites re-install them from scratch and it did nothing for the performance.  There is obviously something different between the computers in the 2 result groups, but I am quickly running out of ideas as to what it could be.  :(

Hey James,

Got a response from MSFT.

We were wondering if there are any Forefront or any other anti-malware software running that can explain this ?

Could you check the "installed programs" on the PC that runs the Silverlight poorly? There might be anti-virus or malware software that could possibly causing the performance issue.

Also, have you tried on browsers such as Firefox?

Regards,
Jimmy

Yes Jimmy, in fact this was the first thing that I checked, as our company uses trend micro for the network antivirus etc, and at first i assumed that was the problem, however 3 of the 8 computers we tested in the office that are running it performed beautifully, same with the other solutions... several of the test machines were running microsoft security essentials and malware bytes and the results on them were inconsistant as well.  

I am however still of th eopinion that the issue lies within the software and or driver configurations, some sort of conflict with the silverlight runtime or what not, simply because so many varying test machines have poerformed both good and bad with no apparent consistancy between the machines / results. 

And yes I have tried many browsers, IE8, IE9 beta, FireFox, Chrome... the results are consitant... them, machines which are running the silverlight apps poorly, run it poorly in all 3 browsers, and in OOB install.  Same with the good performance.  I honestly do not believe this is an issue with the browser.  However I do believe tha t this is an issue outside of our machines and our testing, as I run across random posts all over the place of people having really bad performance with silverlight (lots of them on the various toolkit / ui suite forums) yet many others cannot reproduce the issues.  So I am thinking it has something to do with software or driver / config conflicts with something that is pretty standardly used since it pops up in so many places.  (though you dont realize it until you are having he problem and looking for a solution... then you see how many others are having similar unexplanable and unreproducable performance issues.

I will go over the programs again on each computer and see but finding a consistancy is hard, we even did a fresh OS install and perfrmed all of the updates and got th esame poor performance. It's rather baffling to be honest.

Thanks for all the help with this Jimmy.  It is great to see a company going so far out to help a potential customer even after finding out that the issue is no fault of their own! :)

James, no problems at all :)

FYI, here's the latest response from SL team. Let me know if you manage to figure out anything on it.

So if you already disabled any anti-virus or other unnecessary services that may be running on your machine and it still happening, my other suggestions would be:

- Make sure your video driver is up-to-date

- Install SL4 GDR1 and see if issue is fixed.

-Run a CPU Profiler to try and detect where the bottleneck is.

Otherwise we would need a repro machine to be able to investigate.