VisualD - Performance, Memory Usage, & Update Crash

[Rainer Schuetze]

On 10/02/2020 11:47, Marcel wrote:
> Hello!
> I've been using VisualD for about 3 months now and I've been facing
> several issues that are making it increasingly difficult to work on my
> projects.

Sorry to hear that.

> 
> 1- I have a PC and a laptop. The former has Windows 10 installed and the
> latter has Windows 7: for some reason the "Check Now" button, for
> updating VisualD and the various compilers, causes Visual Studio to
> instantly crash with no error message, followed by a program restart.
> I've faced this issue only recently in my Windows 7 laptop.

I haven't tried to run Visual D in Windows 7 in a while, maybe the
update mechanism has a problem there. What version of VS are you using?

Are there crash dumps in %APPDATA%\Local\CrashDumps that can be analyzed?

> 
> 2- DMD language server's memory usage can get quite high, causing all
> running applications to slow down dramatically. Additionally, once
> memory usage reaches 1~2GB it doesn't decrease, which makes me think its
> leaking memory.

Are you using the "experimental DMD based parsing engine" that came with
0.51? This is known to leak memory (it is based on the dmd compiler
frontend which is built for infinite memory, i.e. it makes it hard to
collect unused memory). I'm gradually trying to fix these leaks.

The standard semantic engine is written in C#, so should not leak memory
(to the extent of what its GC can do). In my experience it uses less
memory than the compiler does.

> 
> 3- Most operations that require semantic analysis are catastrophically
> slow. For example, say you want to find where a symbol is defined (the
> symbol is from the current solution): This operation can take around 2
> MINUTES, and many times the search result is incorrect.

This makes me suspect that you are using the standard "legacy" engine,
though I don't remember waiting minutes for completions (which is
usually the longest operation - especially if UFCS and mixin expansions
are enabled).

The dmd based semantic engine is much faster, but unfortunately code
completion isn't yet very usable. Symbol lookup is pretty good, but
might need some extra work for templates as these might not be analyzed
by the compiler.

> 
> Are there any fixes for these issues?

More specific bug reports can help to pinpoint the actual problems. You
can report them at https://issues.dlang.org/ for component visuald.