Delay/freeze when switching focus & workspace

[fmasa]

Hi!
Thanks for all the new features.

After updating to 0.8.0, I had AeroSpace disabled before I fixed the config file and I noticed that when AerosSpace is enabled there is a noticeable delay (I have no measurements, but it feels like hundreds of milliseconds at least) when either moving focus or changing workspaces. This also happens when I focus windows via cmd+tab, doing this without AeroSpace is instantaneous.

I know it's still beta, but I wanted to ask:

• Do other people experience this delay or am I missing some configuration
• Is this a performance issue in AeroSpace or some inherent limitation of Accessibility API?
• Is there any way to collect logs/diagnostics to find out more?

I'm on M1 Pro + Sonoma.

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I'm not trying to bash AeroSpace - the feature set is great and I use it as a daily driver, but the MacOS felt laggy for a while and now I found out it's only when using AeroSpace and I want to help to make it better.

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Note by @nikitabobko

Related: #242

[nikitabobko]

(1) How many windows do you have opened? (you can use aerospace list-windows --all | wc -l)
(2) Does the AeroSpace still behave poorly if you restart the app?

I saw on my colleague's machine that AeroSpace may behave poorly if there are unreasonably many windows opened (maybe 100 or even more, we didn't count)

I tried to open 20 windows and it performs well, I don't see any delay compared to when AeroSpace is not running

Do other people experience this delay or am I missing some configuration

I can't see any delay on my machine (M1 Pro + Sonoma). I normally don't have more than 10 windows opened

or some inherent limitation of Accessibility API?

I heard several times that Accessibility API is slow. Though, I can't confirm it yet. The only slowness of Accessibility API I noticed is when some apps block their UI thread in some special way (I couldn't reproduce the slowness when I wrote a small app that displays a simple window and blocks the UI thread).

For example, Spotify and Firefox sometimes block the UI thread in a special way for several seconds when I try to quit (cmd+q) either of them, Accessibility API is blocked by these apps until they finally quit. I've not yet debugged this problem. IntelliJ IDEA sometimes blocks the UI thread in a way that blocks accessibility API (I don't know the reproducer yet)

(3) Some of the apps that you are running may have similar problems, so you can try to quit apps one by one to see when AeroSpace delay goes away

[Kamyil]

Hi! I'm experiencing this issue on my Macbook Pro 14 with M1 Pro on macOS Sonoma, but a little bit differently.
When I'm not switching workspaces for a while, then first workspace switch has a little bit of delay
(it's hard to measure that, I'm front-end dev dealing with transitions/animations day-by-day, so my eyes are a little bit trained, but not perfect ofc)

but when I switch and then immediately switch again and again (and so on) it takes noticeably less time to switch.
So it behaves like it does some kind of cool start on first switch and then it runs faster after the first switch, creating illusion that it has some delay on first switch

If there was some logging tool that would allow to measure the time to switch workspace, then I could attach such log file to this comment. It's actually hard to record on video without some keys recording (but I can try ofc)

extra info
I have 5 workspaces with 1 window per workspace

[F-TD5X]

Hi! I'm experiencing this issue too on M1 Pro MBP.

And the situation only happened when I starting debug an application with idea.

Seems this is what @nikitabobko said but a stable reproduce way. (at least for me)

IntelliJ IDEA sometimes blocks the UI thread in a way that blocks accessibility API (I don't know the reproducer yet)

Are there any way I can offer more infos?

[fmasa]

I have IDEA opened 90+% of time, so that might be a culprit 🤔

[fmasa]

I encountered it a few times again and killing IntelliJ IDEA fixes the issue. It seems that AeroSpace commands are queued because of all the workspace switching I tried to do when it hung are quickly applied after the IDEA is killed.

[nikitabobko]

The potential fix is to send accessibility requests to different applications from different threads. This way, if one application hangs, it won't affect others. But I don't know whether Apple accessibility API is thread-safe (My intuition says that it's probably not)

Also, I'm curious whether yabai/Amethyst have this problem (obviously, if they have this problem, it's not as severe for them, because they use native macOS spaces, but AeroSpace needs to constantly move windows to the bottom right corner back and forth)

[cannonrush]

Somewhat related, since it also introduces a noticeable delay: is it possible to execute all commands (such as changing focus or switching workspaces) on key press instead of key release?

[lucax88x]

would also be a good idea to "buffer" these commands?

so let's say I'm in workspace 1 and I do:

• workspace3
• workspace1
• workspace1
• workspace3

but nothing happens because it's hanging somewhere, so instead of seeing 3 workspace changes after some seconds, just buffer and run the last one?

Btw to me happens when I swap to different monitor setup (office => train => home)

And I also 8 workspace, 2 intellij products (rider and datagrip)

[nick-potts]

I've been getting it quite a bit lately.My cpu is often maxed out at 100%, often by a bash process running in my IDEA terminal, and my window management then has a 4-10s delay.

It's easily replicable with stress -c 16 (or whatever cores your Mac has) installed from brew. Interestingly, from a regular terminal this same behaviour doesn't seem to happen.

Also, I'm curious whether yabai/Amethyst have this problem (obviously, if they have this problem, it's not as severe for them, because they use native macOS spaces, but AeroSpace needs to constantly move windows to the bottom right corner back and forth)

I believe from memory they did, but "spaces" was always fine under heavy cpu load.

[gohma231]

I get this a lot as well. I frequently have high CPU load on my machine and aerospace is very delayed in switching.

[diogox]

Same here!

The 4-10s delays are a real struggle :(

Never made the connection to IntelliJ, but can confirm: I daily Goland (it's IntelliJ under the hood) and have been noticing huge slowdowns - potentially as I open more instances(?) - but mostly when I have > 1 monitors connected.