Paint.NET chews up CPU while selection is active

[justingrant]

The animated moving box around a selection is cool, but it eats up CPU on my Vista laptop-- as much as 20% utilization on my 2GHz, dual-core Toshiba M5. On a laptop that kind of continuous CPU utilization will drain the battery very fast. Plus the continuous fan noise and fry-an-egg-on-it heat aren't fun eiither.

I realize I could simply remember to always turn off the selection in Paint.NET to avoid draining the battery, but that seems like a big hassle.

Anyway, I like my battery life and quiet fan-- possible to turn off the animation or at least make it optional?

Not sure if the same problem occurs on non-Vista PCs.

[mastermind7373]

Yes it does. I have W XP Sp2 and it crawls when I get a complex selection. (Though my computer is not that fast...)

[Rick Brewster]

20% CPU utilization sounds pretty decent to me. The selection is drawn with some good anti-aliasing applied, which requires a fair amount of CPU power compared to the way other applications draw selections (usually other apps look pretty ugly in this area).

If you minimize Paint.NET, then it will not use up CPU time.

[BoltBait]

20% CPU utilization sounds pretty decent to me.

I was going to say the same thing. That's not bad at all.

If you minimize Paint.NET, then it will not use up CPU time.

Of course, having PdN minimized makes it a little hard to manipulate images.

[justingrant]

Hi Rick - I realize that 20% on a standalone desktop PC ain't bad, but there are lots of environments (esp. terminal server & mobile PC) where that kind of CPU consumption for an idle application causes problems.

In a perfect world, you'd detect a terminal server or on-batteries mobile PC and adapt your rendering (like the Office apps do, at least on terminal server) to be cheaper on the CPU. But simply having a user-controlled option to turn off animated selection would be fine too.

I know there's a workaround to minimze the app, but when using PDN while flipping back-and-forth between it and other apps (e.g. PowerPoint for slides graphics and Visual Studio for web graphics), it's a big hassle (and hard to remember) to minimze paint.net after every time I switch away from it. Despite knowing the workaround for a few weeks, I've still drained a few batteries when I forgot it! ;-)

Would it be possible to add an option to make the selection rectangle non-animated?

[Rick Brewster]

In a perfect world, you'd detect a terminal server or on-batteries mobile PC and adapt your rendering ...

Well, the transparent windows are disabled when running in a terminal services/remote desktop session. So cut me a little credit here ...

I'd rather not provide any options for this and would prefer to just automatically back down the rendering. Looks like the GetSystemPowerStatus() function allows for detection of this.

An optimization like this will not make it in for 3.0's release on February 1st, but could easily get in to something like 3.01 (March 1st probably).

[ubergoober]

Same here.

Vista here as well. (Final, not beta)

Paint.net is chewing away at @30% cpu with a selection. But, I noticed that this causes the vista window manager (dwm.exe) to crank at about 30% along with Paint.net.

Now I see/feel that while using the desktop. Putting total CPU at about 60% use just when a selection is made.

Toggling between apps to test images in web pages and such, you really feel it as browser reloads, switching windows, etc lag a little more.

No other apps that I've tried seems to cause this. I use paint.net for so much of my graphics editing, I haven't even installed Photoshop CS yet on my new vista install. I suppose I *could* install it and test to see if it's selection does the same... but don't need the bloat or loss of HD space if I don't need to (lappy).

[Rick Brewster]

What kind of CPU and video card do you have?

[rhubarb]

This is a pretty serious bug.

I installed Paint.Net a year or so ago (before 2.5) tried it for a few days, found it too slow, and uninstalled.

Yesterday I decided I'd try again and use it instead of PSP for some screenshots I have to do for work. I Prnt-Scrn-pasted a couple of pictures in (PaintShop Pros Capture function is sorely missed here, but thats a feature req issue).

Then I saw my whole machine slow down. Task manager shows I'm runing a 100%! Not 20%, 100%.

I minimized Paint.Net an saw it went back down to idle.

Today I expanded the window, back up to 100%. I really came close to uninstalling and going back to PSP but decided to check the forum first. Saw this post, did an unselect, back to idle. Amazing.

Take this one seriously. Something as simple as selection eating all my CPU is a deal breaker.

I have a Del D600 1.6GHz with 2 Gig of RAM and a reasonable ATI graphics card (laptop). But frankly, my hardware is irrelevant. If a selection marquee eats 20% of CPU on any machine, it's a bug.

Nice app otherwise. Get me some screen capture and a color match (a la PS) and Im sold

[rhubarb]

Also on the subject of CPU eating.

If I use Ctrl+Select to add to an existing selection, my machine comes to a grinding halt after dragging about 100pixels. I have to drop the selection and wait a few seconds to regain control.

This makes ctrl+select unusable.

(also note that photoshops explicit buttons for add-subtract selection are a more convenient UI)

[Leif]

How often do you turn off / restart your computer?

I haven’t had the selection problem. But a few times paint.NET gets very slow when I do copy, past on big pictures. Then a restart solves the problem.

I suspect it is a ram problem. Properly in some other program.

[Helio]

I'm not having any problem. When I select, it goes no slower than is to be expected on a difficult select. Even then it is not too slow.

[ivandova]

First of all, thanks Rick and other developers for providing such a great software!

The ant-matching effect is much cooler than the one in Photoshop, but it does cause too much CPU usage on my computer.

The worst case is when you use magic wander tool. Normally this will generate a pretty complicated selection area which causes a 100% CPU usage and slows down the whole system.

So i guess it'll be great to have an option to turn it on / off.

Another problem that is related to selection: When you make some multi-selection (make a selection first, and then start a new one while holding Ctrl key), you'll find that it becomes unbearably slow.

I'm using the latest Paint.Net v3.01, on an XP Professional, P4 2.8G, 1.5G RAM system.

Thanks!

[Myrddin]

Much like Leif and Helio said I don't have that much of a problem with selection.

If I use Ctrl+Select to add to an existing selection, my machine comes to a grinding halt after dragging about 100pixels. I have to drop the selection and wait a few seconds to regain control.

I tried this (very cool btw, I learn a lot through troubleshoot) and not a problem. I had three programs running - paint.NET v3.01, Firefox and MediaMonkey, and my CPU usage didn't exceed 40% and I only have 760MB RAM, a 1.6GHz processor on XP Pro and working on a laptop.

[Spy]

I use Vista Ultimate 2GB RAM, Paint.NET 3.07, Core2..

I open an 1000*1000 picture, use CTRL+A, the CPU is on 42-55%!

[Rick Brewster]

Yeah, Spy, we know.