AppleScript and lag - making it unusable

[talkingtobrian]

Hi all. I had a couple of shows up this week. One of them was a small show I was designer and operator on - lighting, with a little projection.

Normally, I have a ton of AppleScript cues that I pull from, for a variety of purposes. I keep a whole library of them. They are tested and served me well over the years. For this show, I had the following controls setup:

• several OSC cues triggering my projection computer
• page up & page down for my prompt book (a PDF open in preview, I send it page up/down commands, on a second screen, via AppleScript)
• forward and back cues, which are applescripts that trigger macros in my lighting software (MagicQ by chamsys)

These are pretty low-key scripts (no pun intended). As an example, one looks like this:

tell application "MagicQ"

activate

tell application "System Events" to keystroke "j"

end tell

tell application "QLab"

activate

end tell

This is, to me, straightforward - send a keystroke to MagicQ, which matches the mapping I had set for my "Back" macro ("j" in this case). Then, sending an activate command to Qlab, to restore focus.

This was working just fine, and I was grateful, because otherwise I would have to Command+Tab back and forth between two applications, and keep my mouse over Preview so I could scroll the script. Nice, neat, and clean. Set hotkeys to everything, and I could run my show. (Please note: yes, I know, sending the keystroke through system events is a slight hair slower than being in the application and hitting the key from there...but the lag was acceptable (kids show) and saved stress. Also, yes, Qlab does lighting now, but this is a repeat client gig, and I built the shows years ago in MagicQ, and didn't want to mess with what works and add to my project time.)

BUT - for no reason that I could discern, suddenly one night during call, my scripts would no longer run properly - it would sit in the active cues, just hanging there, for maybe 10+ seconds, before the command would go through.  It was only the applescripts. OSC was unaffected.  I restarted Qlab, and rebooted several times. Didn't work properly for the rest of the run.

Any ideas? My searches regarding latency were not helpful. 

-Brian