time delay in operating app inventor please help

[youbeingme]

hello, i would greatly appreciate any help.
Up to this point i havent had any problems with the operation of App Inventor 2 (have been using sinve beginning of February, but beginning about 2:30 AM Central Standard Time and continuing up to this point i have run into a major issue. App inventor works fine when signing in through googlebut when the project screen opens the problem starts. For some reason there is now a time delay for any action i choose. if I am in one of my projects (any one of them) and choose any action (if one designer screen, choosing adding a component, etc. if blocks editor, any action at all) there is a delay from time of selection to action happening. For example,  if i am in Designer view and click the blocks button there is a 30 second delay from pressing the button to the screen coming up. The same for if i am doing anything in blocks editor. Last night i was attempting to edit the sprite listed in a string of blocks: I would click the block to drop down my list of loaded sprites, 30 seconds later the drop down menu would appear.
It took about 3 hours to complete a series of tasks that would normally have taken me 45 minutes to an hour.

I thought it was my modem but every page i go to, like www.google.com othere than this works normally.

I thought maybe there was an update or something happening with the website but i dont know.

I quite working last night hoping the issue would resolve by this morning but still having all same issues.
i also using app inventor on my iPad 2 using Safari web browser and everything worked smoothly with that until same point last night.

Please help, is anybody else experiencing this?

[Taifun]

how large is your project meanwhile: how many screens? how many blocks in one screen?

did you upload a lot of assets?

Taifun

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Trying to push the limits of App Inventor! Snippets and Tutorials from Pura Vida Apps by Taifun.         

[Enis]

I see you're using Firefox.  Please try Chrome.  We know about the lagging issue, but it's far worse on Firefox than on Chrome. 

I suspect you have a lot of blocks or a bunch of blocks containing a lot of blocks.  The larger your block set gets, the more it will lag. In one test we did, it was taking 8 seconds of lag ont he project in Chrome, over a minute for the same lag in Firefox.

Try Chrome and please report back to let us know if it helped or not.

[Marcus V. Salles]

Hi, i have the same problem and i am using Chrome. I tried to use AI2U (App Inventor offline) but the time response still the same. I have un aplication with 3 screens and many blocks.(windows 8 - 64bits).

[Enis]

Marcus:


Yes, we know that there's a lag... hopefully that will be fixed soon. They are a very complex and complicated set of mods, but are at the top of the list. In the meantime, there ARE things you can do to speed things up.  These are:

1. Don't keep too many blocks OPEN at once.  Collapse as many as you can.
2. Avoid repetition.  If you have 5 notifiers on a screen when you only need one, that's making the workspace "think" much more than it has to think.
3. Instead of oodles of Global variables, get used to using the local variable blocks.  There's no use in keeping the overhead for tons of globals when you only need a few globals and a lot of local variables.
4. Try to make one procedure do several things, based upon the variables passed to it.
5. Be patient! There's a fix on the way but it's complex and taking a lot of resources to solve.

Hang in there... everything will only get better and better....

[Taifun]

there might be some redundancy in your project?

probably it helps to read chapter 19 - 21 in David's book http://www.appinventor.org/projects to get an idea how to do DRY programming with App Inventor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_repeat_yourself

[youbeingme]

Sorry for the delay in posting. The problem is now fixed thanks to you guys!
At the time of issue starting I had loaded in ten large block sets containing about 15 blocks in each (in addition to many existing blocks). I had ten sprites that needed to act when a collision was in effect. I was able to eliminate a ton of blocks by creating a procedure with methods found in mole mash 2 tutorial to conduct the same action. This immediately sped things up. While I was doing the fix, it did help to use Chrome rather than Firefox. Marcus, if it would help you I can post a pic of that section of code and a little walkthrough.
Thank you so much for your help!

[youbeingme]

okay i spoke a tad bit too soon, lol. the speed issue is nolonger a problem, that part did fix. but now i have a mistake in my procedure and my collision sprite nolonger has the reaction it did. i will post more detail in a new question post. thanks again.