Designer Unresponsive

In Linux Ubuntu 16.04 lately I’ve found that the designer is unresponsive or incredibly slow. Any hints what can be the source of this ? Someone had a similar problem before ?

The designer in the Gateway has 1.5 Gb of memory. I can see that the designer is effectively taking it in account since in the right corner i can see that it has 352/1365 mb

I can even see how the amount of memory it is using changes but still i cant get to do anything else in the interface. I also looked in the system monitor and everything seems alright memory and processor - wise.

I’m using Ignition 7.9.6 and java version 1.8.0_171

Thanks in advance.

I’ve had problems with linux when editing windows that have gradients contained within them. Maybe try removing gradients and see if it fixes it for you, it has for me in the past.

Every single instance I’ve experienced where an Ignition client or designer was slow was one of two problems:

  1. Insufficient memory, including in the gateway, and
  2. Event script mistakes, either running a slow function in an event script (blocks the UI), or events that directly or indirectly retrigger themselves, causing a “storm” of events on the UI thread.
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One of the ways the memory situation can become critical is when the designer is run on the same machine as the gateway, and the sum of the two memory settings exceeds the machine’s actual RAM. That’ll push the machine into swap, and that kills performance.

Thanks for the answer. I thought was that too but I checked and everything seems alright. The machines has 15 Gb of RAM, the client has a cap of 1.5 Gb and the gateways is using 3.3 gB. In free memory I have at least 5 Gb free of RAM with all the other processes in the background so I really dont think is that.

However it seems to be a really specific problem. When the log in screen for the designer appears, it becomes really slow and unresponsive (and it appears to extend to the whole linux system). However, once i ge to enter the username and password and I’m at the project selection screen it all comes back to normal. It is after some time working at the designer that the problem comes back, usually when I’m doing something so I’m inclined to think it is gui related ?

It seems likely that it is gui related. Is there a way to remove the gradients system-wide ? Or java-system wise ?

Which type of Java do you use? I always install the Oracle JDK on ubuntu.

The terminal throw the next when asked for the java version:

java version “1.8.0_171”
Java™ SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_171-b11)
Java HotSpot™ 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.171-b11, mixed mode)

Do you thnik is because of this ?

No, that looks fine.

When the problem is an Event driven Script, How can you get in to delete or fix the script causing the problem?
Example: I made a mistake changing the header color on a power table. Now as soon as I open the window, in Designer, my ignition software locks up or freezes. All other programs work fine. I have maxed out my designer memory on the gateway settings. I have restarted designer and the computer I’m working from.

Tech Support helped to figure out that the large query I had running, set to Absolute Polling Rate, added with the Extension Function scripts setting header colors and column widths was just too much to process and was grinding the screen to a halt.
We changed the query Poll Rate to "Off" and added event driven script to "Refresh" tables.
After these changes the screen runs perfectly.

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I think, something is wrong with your project. May be some scripting or db query tags polling a broken db connection or some module misbehaviour or some other process getting triggered..

Best way to isolate the problem is:

  1. Backup your project
  2. Uninstall and delete Ignition completely.
  3. Open system monitor, sort memorywise, take a snapshot of all the processes.
  4. Install conky and monitor the ram usage and processes.
  5. Download and install latest stable ignition.
  6. Download and restore ignition demo project from Extras. This is a very good benchmark for ignition's heath.
    Extra Ignition Materials | Inductive Automation
  7. Repeat steps 3,4, play with it and ensure if everything is ok.

I have noticed the same problem. Running the gateway and the designer on my machine results in java using over 21 GB of virtual memory. Is there a way to avoid this?

You’ll have to share more about your particular situation, including some details on processes vs. memory consumption. The Java VM for the gateway should not consume much more than the setting for max memory in ignition.conf. Similarly, the designer should limit itself to the configuration specified in the gateway. Unless you’ve changed those settings from default, your problem is likely elsewhere. Is a DB on the same box, too?

Thanks for the response. While watching top this is what the process data shows.

Tasks: 492 total,   1 running, 478 sleeping,   0 stopped,  13 zombie
%Cpu(s):  3.6 us,  1.0 sy,  0.0 ni, 95.3 id,  0.1 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem : 65471972 total,  1749408 free, 19453884 used, 44268680 buff/cache
KiB Swap: 15618044 total, 12880892 free,  2737152 used. 44310332 avail Mem 

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                                                                           
 2910 root      20   0   10.2g   1.4g  11012 S   3.6  2.2   2083:48 /opt/ignition/lib/runtime/jre-nix/bin/java -Ddata.dir=/var/lib/ignition/data -Xms1024m -Xmx2048m+ 
27438 d861703   20   0   21.4g 981344  54240 S   2.0  1.5   6:11.67 /opt/designerlauncher/app/../runtime/bin/./java -jar /opt/designerlauncher/app/launcher-designer+ 
24568 d861703   20   0   21.3g 889924  48088 S   2.3  1.4   6:19.27 /opt/designerlauncher/app/../runtime/bin/./java -jar /opt/designerlauncher/app/launcher-designer+ 
27689 d861703   20   0 8954152 655656  24040 S   2.0  1.0   6:52.23 /home/00/d861703/.ignition/clientlauncher-data/../cache/resources/runtimes/11.0.4/bin/java -clas+ 
63208 d861703   20   0 8881216 553188  24024 S   6.3  0.8   0:52.27 /home/00/d861703/.ignition/clientlauncher-data/../cache/resources/runtimes/11.0.4/bin/java -clas+ 
 3103 mssql     20   0 9373580 470880  15416 S   2.6  0.7   1014:21 /opt/mssql/bin/sqlservr

SQL Server is running but I am using a remote postgresql database as the default.

No changes have been made to the ignition.conf or JVM settings. I am using the /opt/designerlauncher/app/designlauncher.sh script to launch the app.

I’ve never noticed that, but it isn’t a problem. Lots of linux apps ask for more virtual address space than they populate. The linux kernel doesn’t actually give it to them until they use it. The resident memory is the column to pay attention to.

An unresponsive designer is probably due to something else in your setup. Commonly, programmer error due to violation of the rules for the GUI thread (Swing is single threaded in the foreground), or recursion problems in event handlers.

The problem appears to have resolved itself. Thanks for the help.