alice-teacher Alice 3 is lagging when using the Move handle tool

[Vanderhyde, James]

I have been having a lot of problems in class with Alice lagging to the point of being unusable. This started last year, with Alice 3.8 (I think). It is hard to reproduce, so I haven’t reported it before now.

Switching between selected objects causes a slowdown when using different handle tools, especially the Move tool.
I have seen this problem on several different Windows computers, but it is worse on some, depending on the graphics card and the CPU, maybe. It seems to come up after using Alice for a while, so maybe it is a memory leak.

It makes Alice practically unusable. I tell students to avoid the Move tool and just use one shots.

Steps to reproduce (maybe):
1. Add some objects to the scene, and move them around.
2. Go do something else for a while (leave Alice running).
3. Switch back and forth between the tools, particularly the Move tool.

Alice lags. It can be a few seconds, up to 60 to 90 seconds or more. It will eventually respond, but you can’t keep waiting a minute every time you switch objects.

We have a lab of Intel Core i5 machines, 16 GB RAM, Windows 11. The graphics card is Intel UHD Graphics 770.
—
James Vanderhyde
Associate Professor
Computer Science
Saint Xavier University
3700 W. 103rd St.
Chicago, IL 60655
773-298-3454
vanderhyde at sxu.edu
sxu.edu

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