I’ve been using Potlatch for the last few days for editing areas in Co.Clare in Ireland and to the west of Bern in Switzerland. All was well until two days ago and now it has become so slow as to be unusable at times. When I fire it up it takes ages to load the area I want to work on, it takes ages to zoom in, and it often fails to load the tracks when I hit ‘g’. The ‘loading ways’ sign at the top right of the map rotates for ages and ages. It frequently displays the message “A script in this movie is causing Adobe Flash Player 9 to run slowly. If it continues to run, your computer may become unresponsive. Do you want to abort the script ? Yes/No”. At times the browser becomes totally unresponsive. Other functions on the computer (Windows XP, core2duo, 2gb of memory), including a hard-working image editing program, work at normal speed. The CPU meter shows that the CPU is running near full speed and when I kill off the browser page containing the OSM map the CPU meter drops to near zero. I have, of course, checked to see whether other CPU-hogging processes are running on the computer but that is not the case.
So it seems that either Potlatch or some OSM function has slowed down.
Does anyone here know whether Potlatch has been changed in some way in the last few days or what the cause of this problem might be.
I’m sorry it’s slow for you, (I haven’t mapped in the last weeks so I don’t know). You could try other editing programs like josm, merkaartor (See wiki…) It sounds really strange indeed, I’m sure Richard will hop in here and say something…
I’ve found a working solution: if I zoom into a map section of around 12x6km and then start the edit Potlatch works at normal speed. If I start editing with a map of around 30x15km the rotating wheel on the top left goes on for ages (it’s still at it after 5 minutes) and no map components appear. So it seems that the data quantity needed for the 30x15 map overwhelms Potlatch. But that’s no problem. Now that I know the cause I just start with a small map segment.
Curiously, when I start wth a small map segment and then zoom out Potlatch no longer has a problem loading the data.
It would be nice to have a little “Stop loading this page” button in Potlatch similar to the one in the browser so that when it gets into this kind of problem one can simply tell it to stop trying (rather than kill off the browser page, which is my current solution).
A tip, that works better for me, when you want to report a bug report try to enumerate what you did in easy to reproduce step, so we can test for ourselves what happens. e.g.:
This is the way bugzilla tells you to do it and it works very well for firefox and such…
In this case your screen resolution, would probably be important as well, but if I tried to repete those steps I could more easily see what the problem was.
