Very slow Icy interface performance on OS X

[Rob Campbell]

Hello,

 

I was wondering if anyone has run into this issue--looks like no swing hardware acceleration--which results in very slow GUI performance in Icy? The software is pretty much unusable even on a fairly fast laptop. Has anyone run into this and solved it, please? I'm on OS X 10.9.3 running Java 1.8.0_05

 

Thanks

 

Rob

[Rob Campbell]

Ok, the problem was Java 8. Downgrading to 7 has fixed the issue.

Rob

[Stephane]

Hello Rob,

Thanks for reporting ! We indeed experienced this issue on some OSX systems equipped with java 8, it appears that hardware acceleration are not properly working for some reasons. I just added an entry in the FAQ about this problem :)

- Stephane

[Dan Ruderman]

Thanks for these posts.  I have downgraded to Java 7 (java version "1.7.0_67")

with OS X 10.9.4 on a Macbook Air, but am not able to solve the problem. Can

you be more specific on which version of java you were able to get to work?

Also, is there any way within ICY to get a report of the JVM version (just to

be ultra-certain)?

Thanks,

Dan

[Stephane]

Actually it appears that later Java 7 suffers from the same problem :-/ Until the bug is definitely fixed in the JVM, the only way to solve it is to revert on Java 6 but it's definitely not as easy than downgrading to Java 7.

When you start Icy, it displays some logs in the "output" window where you can read which JVM is used.

- Stephane

[Dan Ruderman]

Thanks, Stephane.

Do you happen to recall the version of Java 7 that worked?

Thanks,

Dan

[Stephane]

Hi Dan,

I believe the problem appeared with java 7u40 so any previous version should be ok, the problem is to find out and being able to install an older version !

Best,

- Stephane

[Dan Ruderman]

Hi Stephane,

I was able to download some older versions here:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/java-archive-downloads-javase7-521261.html

None worked for me :(

Perhaps I'm doing something wrong and you will have better luck.

When you say that this is a bug in the JVM and that you expect it to be

fixed at some time, this implies that Oracle knows about it. Is there

an existing bug report that you know of?

Regards,

Dan

[Alexandre Dufour]

Dear Dan,

FYI, I have the exact same issues on my system, and the solution in my case is “simply” to stick to good old Java 6 (originally made by Sun, but customised and delivered by Apple for its systems), which doesn’t suffer from these issues. You can get it here: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1573?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

Can you try with this one?

Alexandre

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[Dan Ruderman]

Thank you Alexandre.

That particular link was for OS X 10.6 (it would not install on 10.9), but I did find this

other link that provided the v6 JRE for 10.9: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1572

This one is working!

Thank you for your assistance.

Dan

[Stephane]

Hi Dan,

We tried to install this package : http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1572
with someone experiencing the issue on 10.9 and it did not worked, the active JVM remains java7 whatever we do, did you made some specific manipulations to get it to work ? Thanks.

- Stephane

[Dan Ruderman]

Hi Stephane,

For me this version of Java was installed such that the following command was able to

launch Icy (with 4GB of heap space):

/System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Commands/java -Xmx4g -jar icy.jar

This is being run from the top level Icy directory where you find icy.jar .  Let me know if this

works for you.

Regards,

Dan

On Tuesday, September 16, 2014 12:43:59 AM UTC-7, Stephane wrote:

Hi Dan,

[Stephane]

Hi Dan,

Thanks Dan for your reply, i understand now, you have to use the command line solution !
I hoped a way to replace the default active JVM in the system so even users could continue to use the default Icy.App launcher to use Icy (which also allow extra JVM options). But still in the meantime that is a good workaround ! Thanks :)

Best,

- Stephane

[Alexandre Dufour]

Hi Stephane,

Since the last few versions of OS X (and the appearance of Oracle’s JVM), Apple doesn’t provide anymore the possibility to select Java 6 as default via system preferences. Therefore the solutions are either:

 — on the target system: reroute manually the “java” command to use the Java 6 version (via a good old “sudo ln -sf” on the command line), but that’s boring/too hard for end users, and this affects the entire system

 — you could store that command within the Icy settings file (if you handle OS-dependent settings), because the command line Dan gave you is the same on all Mac systems.

Alexandre

[Stephane]

Hi Alex,

Thanks, that makes sense, i think Apple wanted to trash out the old Java6 on later OSX version... But what i don't understand is why both Java7 and Java8 are still impacted by this huge issue  :-/

- Stephane