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[Help] Reducing lag in skins with lots of meters

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CyberOfficial
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Joined: December 1st, 2019, 2:35 am
Location: Houston, TX
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[Help] Reducing lag in skins with lots of meters

Post by CyberOfficial »

Hey Rainmeter community,

I'd like to get into animating my skins with the ActionTimer plugin, but I've been coming across a lag problem. It appears that, once I have around 20 meters rendered at a time (a small amount for all of the skins that I'm making), Rainmeter caps the skin's framerate at around 10 FPS. At this point, even hover actions have a noticable delay. This effect isn't gradual either. In my latest test, with 20 meters loaded, everything ran nice and smooth, but introducing a 21st meter, even if it was just a string, killed the skin's preformance.

Is there something that I can do to optimize the way I'm updating/redrawing my skins? As of now, I've been using [!UpdateMeter *][!Redraw], which is what's shown in the docs, but it doesn't seem to be any more efficient than just using [!Update].

My CPU is an Intel Core i7 6700K and my GPU is an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080, so I doubt my system specs are bottlenecking anything. Is this just a limitation of Rainmeter, or am I missing something?

(I'm running the latest version of Rainmeter)
mak_kawa
Posts: 908
Joined: December 30th, 2015, 9:47 am

Re: [Help] Reducing lag in skins with lots of meters

Post by mak_kawa »

Hi CyberOfficial

My CPU is old-fashioned Core i7 2600 (!!), and my 24 skins on desktop are rendering tons of meters simultaneously. But I have not noticed "lag" as you said at all. CPU utilization of Rainmeter is 1.5 - 3.0 % around.

So I suspect that the cause of the "lag" is not the numbers of meters but something other than it. But of course, I am not sure.
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balala
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Joined: October 11th, 2010, 6:27 pm
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Re: [Help] Reducing lag in skins with lots of meters

Post by balala »

CyberOfficial wrote: February 22nd, 2020, 6:42 am Is there something that I can do to optimize the way I'm updating/redrawing my skins? As of now, I've been using [!UpdateMeter *][!Redraw], which is what's shown in the docs, but it doesn't seem to be any more efficient than just using [!Update].
In some cases the ActionTimer plugin can cause such problems while it is running. Not well documented (at least me couldn't find such documentation) and additionally the problems seem to appear "randomly", sometimes they do, other times they don't appear. When I say this, I'm talking from my own experience.
Would be great if you could pack the skin in cause, along with all needed resources, to can test it. Let's see how does it works on my (our) system. Then maybe we can figure out something (however unfortunately I tend to say there is not too much you could do).
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