Flare hanging when MBP wakes up

[chuck_agari]

This has happened twice now, and it worries me. It does not happen all the time, but both times it happened it did so toward the end of a day, after I had been using Flare for awhile. Here's the behavior:

When I go to a meeting or go to eat in the kitchen, I take my MBP with me. I be checking email or writing Jira tickets or checking Slack because Flare on a 15-inch screen isn't all that usable. Mostly, when I get back to my desk, I open my MBP and go back to work. Yeah, I'll usually have to resize some apps and put Slack back on the MBP screen while I work on my larger monitor, but mostly, no biggie. But twice now, when I Alt-Tab back to Parallels and Flare, Flare is stuck. It's usually a smaller window, and with no content displaying in any of its panes or tabs. I cannot move or resize the window, not can I click on the window to give it focus, even though it does not seem to be ever not focused. I can't minimize or close the window.

The first time, I just opened Task Manager, saw that Flare was using around 50% of the CPU cycles, and stopped the task. This time (just awhile ago), in the time it took me to try and "get to" Flare, then take a screen cap and message my manager that this behavior is giving me second thoughts about purchasing Flare, Flare finally "came back." I went back to the app and all the content was rendered in its panes and tabs, and I was able to operate in the app again. But a good 5 minutes or more I was in this state, not even with a "Not Responding" in the title bar as Windows apps are wont to do.

I don't think it's a memory issue. The memory footprint in Task Manager seems to be about right, and it doesn't seem to be growing as it would if garbage collection was failing. This seems more like some kind of race condition, and of course because I'm working in a VM, figuring out where the issue might be manifesting becomes more tricky. Once is a random happening, but twice.....make me think twice. Anyone else seen this happening?

[ChoccieMuffin]

If you're still evaluating Flare with a view to purchasing it, contact your Madcap Sales Rep. They will be able to speak to the techies in the broom cupboard and may be able to suggest a solution. If you get a usable response, please do share it with the rest of us.

[Nita Beck]

What I'm about to say is *totally* anecdotal: The several Flare pals I have who have used Flare on Parallels ended up switching to VMWare after experiencing all kinds of wonkiness with Parallels. If memory serves, recurring complaints were about Flare's UI getting hosed. Once they moved to VMWare, they no longer experienced those issues. But, as I said, this is totally anecdotal. FWIW, I use VMWare and haven't had serious issues with Flare.

Also (perhaps unrelated, perhaps not) the conventional wisdom is not to let Flare run for hours and hours and hours. Sad to say that you will get performance issues. Best practice is to shut it down every once in a while over the course of the day.

[chuck_agari]

Thanks for the VM tip. Shouldn't be an issue to give VMware a try. We just happened to have Parallels licenses here, so that was the default go-to.

However, a do have to point out, techie pedant that I am, that to have to shut software down every now and then is an indicator of bad code. Yeah, I know we do it with just about everything, routers, phones, cable boxes, and so on, even Windows itself, but it's still bad code, and a mature product should be able to handle at least days without issue, not need attention in mere hours.

What I'm about to say is *totally* anecdotal: The several Flare pals I have who have used Flare on Parallels ended up switching to VMWare after experiencing all kinds of wonkiness with Parallels. If memory serves, recurring complaints were about Flare's UI getting hosed. Once they moved to VMWare, they no longer experienced those issues. But, as I said, this is totally anecdotal. FWIW, I use VMWare and haven't had serious issues with Flare.

Also (perhaps unrelated, perhaps not) the conventional wisdom is not to let Flare run for hours and hours and hours. Sad to say that you will get performance issues. Best practice is to shut it down every once in a while over the course of the day.

[Nita Beck]

I don't dispute your complaint at all.

[chuck_agari]

VMware seems to have its own little quirks--although so far not affecting being able to use Flare. Oh for a Mac or SaaS version of Flare........

I don't dispute your complaint at all.

[chuck_agari]

I got an interesting email from Madcap support. Seems like there's an issue with "Coherence mode" in Parallels.

Info about what this is: https://kb.parallels.com/en/4670

I installed VMware yesterday, a Flare demo, and moved my test project over there to try it out. So far, no issues like I had with Parallels. I might try Parallels with Coherence mode turned off just because we have a Parallels license already, although an extra $80 for VMware won't break the bank or anything.

What I'm about to say is *totally* anecdotal: The several Flare pals I have who have used Flare on Parallels ended up switching to VMWare after experiencing all kinds of wonkiness with Parallels. If memory serves, recurring complaints were about Flare's UI getting hosed. Once they moved to VMWare, they no longer experienced those issues. But, as I said, this is totally anecdotal. FWIW, I use VMWare and haven't had serious issues with Flare.

Also (perhaps unrelated, perhaps not) the conventional wisdom is not to let Flare run for hours and hours and hours. Sad to say that you will get performance issues. Best practice is to shut it down every once in a while over the course of the day.

[lorynj]

I use Flare on a current model iMac under Parallels running in Confluence mode. I have zero problems with Flare 2018 under this setup.

Earlier this year (when still using Flare 2017 r3) I evaluated Flare running under VMWare and Parallels. I concluded that Parallels’ graphics performance was far faster than VMWare’s. On my machine, Parallels was a clear winner.

Loryn Jenkins
Franchise Cloud Solutions

[chuck_agari]

I use Flare on a current model iMac under Parallels running in Confluence mode. I have zero problems with Flare 2018 under this setup.

Earlier this year (when still using Flare 2017 r3) I evaluated Flare running under VMWare and Parallels. I concluded that Parallels’ graphics performance was far faster than VMWare’s. On my machine, Parallels was a clear winner.

Loryn Jenkins
Franchise Cloud Solutions

I didn't see a significant difference in graphics performance Parallels and VMware. Ended up going with VMware.

I should add, though, that I have never been impressed with Flare's graphics performance, and that goes all the way back to when I was a beta tester for version 1. At the moment, I'm allocating 8MB of system RAM and 1GB (I think) of video memory (of the 2GB that the Radeon Pro has) to the VM on a 2017 MBP with 16GB of RAM and an i7 CPU. Then again, I'm pushing a lot of pixels on this Dell 27-inch 2560x1440 display. Not only a lot of pixels, but the Flare UI (as with many programs) wasn't coded to scale well.