Net Highlight is very slow

[Victor W]

On our design, when we look to highlight a net in EESchema, it takes approximately 15-25s for the operation to complete. Moreover, when we switch views to a different sheet, it takes another 15-25s for us to switch sheets.

This makes the feature fairly unusable, as it slows the entire program down, and we can't stop it.

We have a large, complex, multi-sheet design, with around 3000 nets, and 124 sheets.

We are currently using the nightly version of kicad;

----

Application: kicad
Version: (6.0.0-rc1-dev-1579-gbb2e402bc), release build
Libraries:
    wxWidgets 3.0.4
    libcurl/7.63.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1a zlib/1.2.11 libidn2/2.1.0 libpsl/0.20.2 (+libidn2/2.1.0) libssh2/1.8.0 nghttp2/1.35.1
Platform: Linux 4.20.2-arch1-1-ARCH x86_64, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK
Build Info:
    wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8) GTK+ 2.24
    Boost: 1.69.0
    OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
    Curl: 7.63.0
    Compiler: GCC 8.2.1 with C++ ABI 1013

Build settings:
    USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=OFF
    USE_WX_OVERLAY=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
    BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
    KICAD_SPICE=ON

[Tomasz Wlostowski (twlostow)]

Hi Victor,

Would you share (in private) the schematics with us so that we can see where exactly is the performance bottleneck?

Tom

[Seth Hillbrand (sethh)]

@Tom, Victor-

I suspect that this is the netlist re-generate issue that Jon is addressing[1] as a by-product of the bus upgrades.

[1]https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg32423.html

[jean-pierre charras (jp-charras)]

I also suspect that is the netlist rebuilding.
It could be worth to test the new Jon'algoritm with this schematic, and see it is able to fix calculation time issue.

[Seth Hillbrand (sethh)]

Tagging the milestone so that we remember to re-visit after Jon merges his code.

[Victor W (vicw)]

Hi,

Sorry for dropping out of the conversation. Using the latest build, highlighting a net is still very slow.

vvv

[Jon Evans (craftyjon)]

Hi Victor,
On the latest nightly, do you see the slowdown every time you select an object to highlight (with the tool already active) or just when you click the button to activate the highlight tool?

I suspect there are more things going on than just the connectivity update, if entering sheets is also very slow.

If you can share your design with me (in private) I can analyze where the slowdowns are coming from with that in particular. I understand if that is not possible.

Thanks,
Jon

[Jon Evans (craftyjon)]

I have begun to do some profiling of the design in question. Indeed the main problem with Eeschema is netlisting, even with the new algorithm. I can see some approaches to improve this.

[KiCad Janitor (kicad-janitor)]

KiCad bug tracker has moved to Gitlab. This report is now available here: https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/1794