HORRIBLY SLOW on Macbook pro 15'' retina display

Question

Hi

Just installed yEd on my MBP with OSX Mavericks .

I have 15''  Retina display + 2 external Dell Ultrasharp HD monitors

when yEd window in on the main display (retina), every click, scroll, mousewheel that requires rendering update takes more than 10s and hogs all my CPU. Absolutely impossible to work that way.

As soon as I move the main window onto a secondary display, the rendering is faster (ahem.. if we consider normal to wait half a second to draw a rectangle... There is still some lag but it's more acceptable to work)

I tried with my preinstalled java 1.8 + the yed JAR, and the dmg install (with bundled java) : both are VERY VERY SLOW

What is the problem?

Comments

I can confirm the problem with the bundled version of Oracle Java 8. I was experiencing significant lag in almost all operations that require scrolling or moving items with the yEd 3.14.1 JRE bundle version on OS X 10.10.3 on a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014).

I downloaded the jar version of yEd 3.14.1, and ran it with Apple's most recent version of Java 1.6 (1.6.0_65 as installed via JavaForOSX2014-001), and that solved the problem.

Answer 1

Most likely Oracle Java is the problem. Oracle simplified some rendering code for Mac OSX thereby introducing a performance break down for some use cases.

There are currently three things you can try to improve perfomance:

1. Run yed.jar with Java 8u40. According to JDK-8029253: [macosx] Performance problems with Retina display on Mac OS X, rendering perfomance has been improved for 8u40. (Unfortunately, we do not have a test machine with retina display available, so I cannot verify whether or not 8u40 truly fixes rendering performance.)
2. Run yed.jar with the old Apple Java from Apple's Java for OS X 2014-001 page.
3. Do not use drop shadows for you diagram elements. According to several other user reports, it is the drop shadows that trigger the Oracle Java rendering performance problems in yEd.

Comments

Hi Thomas. I updated to the latest version of java as you suggested, and now it works fine. In the meantime, I upgraded to Yosemite (OsX 10.10) and still no problem.
thanks for your help!
- Sam -