I did export and delete about half of my 50 or so macro groups so now I'm down to about 25 groups listed (all disabled unless being used or the Global Macro Group), and restarted everything, and it seems to have improved performance a bit. Now instead of waiting say four seconds every time I do anything it's now down to maybe a two second wait each time.
Thanks, Peter. This could be one of my problems. Any particular macro I make has probably between 5 and 50 actions. I'll have to work on splitting them up more between macros.
I had noticed that in the past, for instance a spinning wheel pause until a result showed up of true/false on an if/then, or a search variable finding something. So because of that I'd always started collapsing/minimising every action once made hoping it would stop that from happening. Since they were minimised I wasn't exactly sure if it worked or not. If they are minimised but displayed in the editor (if I'm editing a macro with displayed but minimised actions on the screen) do they then not do the searching for the information?
I do use a lot of actions that do these kinds of tasks. I use a lot of if/thens, a lot of switches, and I use a lot of variable searches. The variable searches in particular have given me lots of headaches to edit over the long run that relates to the whole lagging issue. Even before every single thing I did started to lag, sometimes editing a search variable alone would become really laggy. Sometimes it would/will even freeze or crash the app. It seems every single change I make to the input of a search variable regular expression causes it to re-search right away, so if I'm rewriting or adding a lot to the input it can get really really laggy, and if I add a regular expression character that makes the input do something strange, even though a later character would fix it, that's when things like freezes, crashes or looong lags (of minutes) can happen. At one point I had started adding disabled 'input text by pasting' actions below each search variable, and then writing the input in those before copy and pasting into the search variable when I was done, but found that too cumbersome so I stopped. I had also tried quitting the engine while editing which did work but again was too cumbersome since I'd often need to try things out in between edits and therefore constantly open and quit the engine. Is there any advice on the best way to edit regular expressions in search variables to optimise the editor performance while editing?
Also, I sometimes use big or complex regular expressions. In general, could this contribute to lag in the editor?
I will keep this in mind, thanks. I rarely use menu conditions so I don't think it's what's causing the lag but I do use them sometimes and will make sure to do that.
This could be a problem as I do sometimes have the macros interact with browsers... although I usually don't use specifically-focused browser actions. I'd found in the past they might be a little slower or less consistent so I usually make things work with non-app/program/browser specific actions that still work on the browser. For instance, instead of 'next chrome tab' I might use 'press keystroke' to press the computer's hotkey combo that moves chrome to the next tab.