Insanely slow performance due to beta?
 

Just wondering if we can expect a dramatic increase in performance when OmniPlan is no longer in beta. I realize beta software is going to run slower than final releases due to debugging code etc., but I thought I'd ask anyway, because, once you've added about 80-100 tasks to a project, things become unbearably slow. I sincerely hope the final release will be at least 10 times faster, otherwise I really doubt I'll be able to use it.

I'm running 1.0b7 on a PowerBook G4 (1.67 GHz, 1.5 GB RAM, Oct 2005 model). Mac OS X 10.4.8.

That's very helpful feedback. We've done a bit of optimization work, but so far we have put a higher priority on getting stuff to work, before we get it to work fast. We do hope to work on this before the final release, though.

Are there specific actions that are most aggravating? Also, how many resources are in your project?

I've been using OP quite successfully with a 500+ line plan on a 1.33 G4 for the past couple of months. The main areas where performance is an issues are:

- Dragging tasks: the time lag with a medium sized plan makes it very difficult to assess the correct place to stop dragging. This applies to both moving them and changing their duration. This causes severe usabilty issues as it makes one of OP's most attractive features almost too difficult/sluggish to use to be effective.

- Updating styles: this takes quite a long time but does not really impact usability. It just annoying.

- Resource view: filtering tasks by resource is very slow. This does not make it easy to jump from resource to resource.

- Text input: the response rate to key presses is also slow. I seem to find myself freqruently deleting too many characters when editing info.

For myself these are the three main areas of poor performance, although, at present, most of the app could do with a speed boost.

May I also ask if any further work is being done with the critical path analysis? OP doesn't appear to calculate it all the way through a plan.

These are the most noticeable things that become very slow once the project is even moderately complex:

- Dragging tasks up or down in the outline.

- Adding or removing task rows.

- Doing anything in the Gantt chart -- moving tasks, changing start or end times, creating dependencies, or changing the completion percentage of a task.

I realize OmniPlan has a lot more calculations going on than OmniOutliner, but I'm used to the performance of the latter (which is excellent even with tens of thousands of rows in one document), and the difference is like night and day. In order to properly test OmniPlan, I needed a real project to test it with, and I happen to be planning a relatively big one right now, so I gave it my best shot. I was able to establish the overall outline, but as I started to flesh out the individual items into each task, and set the durations and dependencies, it didn't take long to become hopelessly frustrating, and eventually I had to abandon it as it was impossible to get any real work done.

That said, I love OmniOutliner, and I think it's a great idea to expand on the outliner concept with the extra planning features, so I'm behind OmniPlan all the way. I'm gonna have to root for it from the sidelines until it's matured a little more, but I will certainly continue to test each new beta.