P: Zoom and Pan performance is poor since a couple years.

Thanks for the details on your peripherals. As I said, a long shot. And also, thanks for your additional help localizing and narrowing the conditions.  That’s good data and very helpful. There has been some recent work on Ruler Performance issues, but only between 23.0 and 23.1.

I spent some more time today using your information. Sadly, I still cannot reproduce. I do have a Cintiq attached to my Windows system. I am using a simple 50 pixels soft round brush; Are you using the same?

I’m going to write this all up on a bug and get some other folks on the team to try in their systems. It will reference this support thread.

Sorry, one more thing.  I'd turned Windows Ink off in the Wacom settings when we last spoke about it.  Now I've turned Windows Ink back on and that resolved the performance issue related to the use of the stylus.  The performance hit from the rulers is still there though, so the problem is just the rulers.

One more thing.  Zooming and panning are much worse with the stylus than with the mouse.  So, All together this is presenting me with the problems I'm seeing.  With rulers on, and using stylus, zooming, panning, and rotating the screen are all suffering.  Without rulers, and just using a mouse, it appears to be fine.

Messing around right now for a few minutes, I believe I have found the problem.  It's the rulers. I knew the rulers caused a performance hit, but I didn't focus on it too intently until now.  With the rulers visible, it misses possibly 5 out of 10 attempts at zooming and when it does respond, it may only zoom half way. When I turn off the rulers, it doesn't miss a single zoom attempt and panning appears to be perfectly responsive.  This seems to be the whole problem.  Photoshop has a performance problem when the rulers are visible.

The only peripheral of any interest attached to my PC is my Wacom Cintiq 27QHD monitor.  Other than that, I have a mouse and keyboard, and basic speakers.  That's it.  The printer is Wifi.  There's nothing else.  But I think this is really just the normal performance of Photoshop.  I've just updated the graphics card drivers yesterday and that didn't help.  I'm out of ideas.  It really seems like it's just poor performance from Photoshop.  I'm going to reinstall Photoshop CS3 and just see if it it responds more quickly to panning.  Zooming is different now so I can't really compare that.

I spent some time trying to reproduce on my system. Unfortunately, I am not seeing what you describe. I tried the alternate paint-pan-paint-pan-paint as you described on the simple test document you indicated should expose the issue. I also tried these steps on some larger 100 MP images. When things open up at Adobe on January 4, I'll see if I can get some other folks to try as well.

One of your comments in your last post caught my attention: you indicated the delay you were seeing appeared to be about 3/4 second. In computing terms, that's enormous. It's a bit of a long shot, but can you describe the various external devices you have attached to your computer? USB devices, peripherals, etc. Use your Device Manager to see them all. (The reason I ask is that Device drivers, particularly USB drivers, can be bad citizens, especially if they are doing some kind of error handling. They operate at high priority, and they can cause brief lockups as they retry whatever operation they are doing. Graphics cards too. Those delays can be 0.5-1.0 seconds fairly easily.)

For screen rotation, I use the Wacom EK Remote.  A button on the remote is bound to the R key on the keyboard.  So I press and hold the button which is the same as holding R key on keyboard.  Same for Control, Shift, Alt, etc.  That's how I'm controling everything when I'm drawing.  When I'm doing production work I'm often just using mouse and keyboard.  All the same problems are there regardless of using keyboard or EK Remote.

Regarding gestures, I hold the key(s) press the mouse button and move it in one direction or another.  If using EK Remote, I'll hold button on EK Remote which is bound to the key(s).  Nothing special.  No flick panning, anything other than the old fashioned way.

• Paint a stroke: Paint tool selected, simple brush (soft-circular) selected, mouse-down, drag, mouse-up. Paint stroke appears during mouse-down while dragging. No keyboard modifiers while painting the stroke.  -  CORRECT
• Then Zoom: Control-spacebar held down, then mouse-down, then move the mouse left or right to control zoom, then mouse-up.  -  CORRECT
• Or Pan: Spacebar held down, then mouse-down, then move the mouse up, down, left or right to control panning, then mouse up.  -  CORRECT
• Then quickly Paint a stroke again: (same settings) Mouse-down, drag (stroke appears), mouse-up (painting stops).  -  CORRECT

When you release the keyboard keys after zoom or panning and do an immediate mouse-down with the intention of painting, painting does not happen? Or painting occurs in the wrong place?

After some more testing today, I have some better details on this.  Because I opened a document and simply attempted to pan or zoom over and over, what I find is simply that Photoshop just does not always respond. So, I pan, pan, pan, pan, pan.  Photoshop simply misses quite a few of those panning attempts, or zoom attempts.  When I pan, paint, pan, paint, there's another issue.  Immediately after attempting to paint, or erase, I attempt a pan followed quickly by another brush stroke. Here the pan doesn't happen and the brush stroke doesn't happen.  Photoshop pauses for about 3/4 second. Then the brush stroke or eraser mark appears, but the pan or zoom action never happened.  So, it froze, skipped the pan/zoom, then presented the brush stroke.  So, there's a performance issue when simply panning or zooming over and over.  Many times it misses the action completely, and other times the zoom or pan result is only half the movement distance that it should be.  There's both an initial lag from the start of the panning/zooming action, and it only registers half of the intended pan or zoom, or nothing at all.

I understand that you're trying to reproduce the problem.  I'm guessing that you would not have any problem at all if for example you're simply quickly panning over and over.  Or zooming over and over.  If you don't have trouble doing that, then you're probably not going to see the additional issue when panning and painting or erasing.  I believe the initial lag the real issue. It simply causes me the most trouble when painting or editing because that is what I'm always doing with my work.  But it seems that Photoshop is lagging with just trying to pan, zoom, or rotate screen.  Even if I do one zoom, I can see that it is lagging.  If I do a bunch of zooms or pans, it will miss many of them, or only partially reflect some of them with half the distance movements.

 -- "the problem also happens with screen rotation, and sometimes, very often, it simply does not register the gesture at all."

Thanks. What gestures / controls are you using for screen rotation?

(And just to clarify, when I use the word "gesture", it means any control or sequence of controls you are using, keyboard chording, mouse-down, dragging, mouse-up, shortcuts, clicking on panel buttons, and so on. I consider those all "gestures". It's not just the mouse-movement; it's everything you are using to control the application. Sorry for the lingo thing.)

Sorry to appear pedantic, but I'm trying to gather steps precise enough to have confidence we're following in the same footsteps as you.

So to clarify - Is the following accurate?

• Paint a stroke: Paint tool selected, simple brush (soft-circular) selected, mouse-down, drag, mouse-up. Paint stroke appears during mouse-down while dragging. No keyboard modifiers while painting the stroke.
• Then Zoom: Control-spacebar held down, then mouse-down, then move the mouse left or right to control zoom, then mouse-up.
• Or Pan: Spacebar held down, then mouse-down, then move the mouse up, down, left or right to control panning, then mouse up.
• Then quickly Paint a stroke again: (same settings) Mouse-down, drag (stroke appears), mouse-up (painting stops).

When you release the keyboard keys after zoom or panning and do an immediate mouse-down with the intention of painting, painting does not happen? Or painting occurs in the wrong place?

I'm just trying to get a sense of when and where things are going sideways out for you. I'm currently trying to reproduce on my Windows machine, but probably my brushing and keyboard finger-play is not as fast as yours. 🙂

I'm using 23.1.0 at this moment because I've just updated a couple days ago.  So, that hasn't made any difference.

The problems are happening when using the mouse, and also when using stylus.  I'm using a Wacom Cintiq 27QHD which had been set to use Windows Ink.  I disabled Windows Ink in the Wacom settings, and restarted Photoshop but there's no difference in performance.

"From your initial description, are these accurate?

1. You paint, quickly execute a Pan gesture, quickly followed by another Paint stroke, but the Pan gesture happens too late and the Paint Stroke happens in the wrong location.
2. You paint, quickly execute a Zoom gesture, quickly followed by another Paint stroke, but the paint stroke falls in the wrong location."

All of that is correct, and the problem also happens with screen rotation, and sometimes, very often, it simply does not register the gesture at all.

• Where is the mouse when you start the gesture? (I presume over the canvas) -  YES, OVER THE CANVAS
• When does mouse-down occur? (we enter a tracking state at that point)  -  I HOVER OVER THE SCREEN. I HOLD CONTROL AND SPACEBAR, THEN MOUSE DOWN, THEN GESTURE.
• What keyboard modifiers or accelerators you are using and when? (mouse-down? Mouse-up?)    -   CONTROL/SPACEBAR
• When do you mouse-up? (we leave the tracking state)  -  I RELEASE THE MOUSE BUTTON IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE GESTURE.  BUT IF I WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT IT REGISTERS THE GESTURE, I MUST WAIT A HALF SECOND BEFORE RELEASING THE MOUSE BUTTON. CHANCES ARE IT WILL NOT REGISTER.
• When do you see a screen update?  WHEN I DO THE GESTURE, IT DOES NOT IMMEDIATELY REACT.  MAYBE A QUARTER SECOND LATER.  I MUST DELIBERATELY GIVE IT TIME TO REACT BEFORE RELEASING THE MOUSE BUTTON.  ALSO, IF I ZOOM OR PAN AT MY NORMAL SPEED, IT WILL LIKELY NOT ZOOM AND PAN THE CORRECT DISTANCE.  IT MAY MOVE HALF THE EXPECTED DISTANCE.

"User Friction" is perfect description for this problem.  Thanks for your help!