Hero Lab slow under WINE on Fedora 13.

[osopolare]

I'm running Fedora 13, Dual Core 2.8GHz CPUs, 4 GB of RAM.

I'm using WINE version 1.3.18-1. (Latest in the dev tree)

Hero Lab is stable and fully functional in this configuration. It's only crashed on me once in about a month of use.

I am seeing terribly slow performance however. I have only used it under Wine so I don't really have a baseline to compare it with. What is expected performance?

Let me give you an example. I have 12 high-level Monsters loaded in a single portfolio. When I switch between monsters using the dashboard it takes between 4 to 6 seconds for the other character to be available.

Within a single monster when switching between the "Spells" and "In-Play" tabs it can take ~4 seconds.

This does seem to be related to the complexity of the character. Switching between two blank characters takes only 1.5 seconds or so. Though switching between tabs though is still ~4 secs or so.

Is this expected performance? This seems very slow to me. I'm trying to figure out if this could be something related to Wine (which would make me look at running HL in a VM) or if this sort of performance should be expected with this application.

Thank you for any feedback.
-oso

[osopolare]

Beuller?

Is that performance normal in a Windows environment?

[chiefweasel]

It sounds like a performance problem caused by Wine. I find the perfomance faster on a Windows machine, so what you are seeing isnt average. But i dont know much about WINE to know if that product just takes time for the conversion process.

[Duggan]

It's unsual in my experience as well. I ran HeroLab under Ubuntu and Wine for a while (after they fixed the bug with... I think it was a button, that cause the program to freeze up every time it loaded) and while it was generally slower, it wasn't appreciably so. Nonethless, I started using VirtualBox to run it because the buttons never quite rendered right.

You could post the portfolios in question to have people run benchmarks, but I'm an M&M person myself so I'll be of little help there.

[rob]

My system specs should make it SLIGHTLY faster than yours, but pretty similar. Running Hero Lab under Windows with 12 random monsters of CR 11 or higher, the response for me is extremely quick.

Switching between monsters via the dashboard takes less than 0.5 seconds.
Switching between the Spells and In-Play tab is essentially instantaneous.

I grabbed somewhat complex monsters for this test, centering on Demons and Devils due to their extensive powers and spell-like abilities.

So it definitely appears that WINE is the culprit here. I recommend grabbing VirtualBox, since it's free. Then you can run HL in demo mode within a VM to verify the performance issue is actually WINE without outlaying any extra cash for the test.

Hope this helps!

[flux]

I've also run into WINE sluggishness on an OSX machine running Hero Lab - Pathfinder (print preview is downright brutal, but the whole app is on the slow side in WINE); running in windows is, by contrast, quite snappy. Looking forward tot he native mac version!