Workflow freeze with Knime 3.7.1

quaeler · February 24, 2019, 9:42pm

Hi @gmakara - Have you experienced further freezes since installing the 2nd iteration of the patch jar?

gmakara · February 25, 2019, 6:32am

I do not think so. Looks much more stable.

quaeler · February 25, 2019, 3:45pm

Good - thanks for the testing and feedback.

quaeler · February 26, 2019, 1:06am

Not to beat a perhaps-dead-horse, but could you give me a bit more detail on this slow copy & paste?

Running 3.7.1 with the 2nd iteration patch described in this thread, i grabbed the 50_Applications/36_Guided_Analytics_for_ML_Automation/01_Guided_Analytics_for_ML_Automation/01_Guided_Analytics_for_ML_Automation workflow from the KNIME public repository which has 1860 nodes; i copied and pasted all the nodes in one go from the original workflow to a new workflow and it completed in 3-ish seconds.

In addition to more details of what you’re doing, could you also try the public workflow so that we have a data common touchpoint?

The forum isn’t thrilled about me uploading a 4.7M GIF, but i put a screen cast of the try here: http://theori.st/take_away/knime/1860_node_copy_paste_patched_371.gif

Edlueze · February 26, 2019, 1:47am

I may have exaggerated the delay. It did take a really long time, but I remembered later that it took several attempts and I subconsciously added everything up. But I can add a few observations:

As I was copying everything from inside a MetaNode (including the MetaNode’s input-output blocks) to a top-level workflow (with no MetaNodes) a lot of branches connecting to the input-output blocks had to be pruned. This seemed to take the UI a lot of extra thinking.
As I’ve got so many nodes I spend a lot of time manually re-directing the connection paths to make them all look neat. I originally used the straight-connections but copy-and-pasted into a curved-connections workflow. The UI really seemed to struggle with changing all of the connection directions, and the UI spent a lot of wasted time jumping around the workflow showing you bundles of connections being re-established. I tried again with a straight-connections workflow and it seemed to work better, but there was still a lot of unnecessary jumping around.

I’ve not tried to do anything similar since, but I’ve not noticed a dramatic overall performance degradation in the rest of KNIME 3.7.1.

Edlueze · February 26, 2019, 1:49am

Just to be clear, I selected 500 individual nodes for the copy-and-paste (not 10 metanodes as you did in your GIF). Sorry - I should have watched your GIF first before replying.

quaeler · February 26, 2019, 3:39am

:- ) you’re going to make me make a workflow with 500 nodes on a single level, aren’t you?

While their could be something about nodes being all on the same level, at the end of the day, i did cut and paste 1860 nodes; they weren’t all on the same container level, but they got copied.

The connection conjecture is interesting; i’ll do some local de-construction.

Edlueze · February 26, 2019, 3:43am

Yes - I agree - I’m seeing that also.

quaeler · February 26, 2019, 4:03am

Oh ya - ok… so in that same 1860 node workflow, i went 1 level into the “Training and Validation of Models” metanode, and then started expanding all metanodes in here (and all their metanodes, and all their metanodes, …) I got tired of trying to click on the exact metanode as it became soupier and soupier, but there was a sizeable-but-less-than-500 amount (screenshot below) which i then cut and paste.

Indeed, it both took perhaps 20 seconds for the paste, and also there was a lot of samba-ing of the viewport as something was trying to be calculated.

I’ll file a bug, but imaginably one response might be “this is why we have metanodes - to better visually and performance-wise organize the workflows.”

Thanks for the feedback and insights, btw.

ScottF · February 26, 2019, 3:50pm

That screenshot is like… terrifying… modern art. It deserves some sort of award

Edlueze · February 28, 2019, 2:34am

Hi @quaeler - another small but annoying issue with the updated UI has to do with the creating of new Workflow Annotations.

If I’m at the bottom-right-corner of my large workflow and I right-click “New Workflow Annotation” then the new annotation will be created way-up at the top-left-corner of my workflow. I then have to drag it back down to the right-corner.

Which reminds me of another small but even more annoying UI issue. This issue has been a part of the Windows KNIME UI forever. That is, it is very difficult to drag nodes outside of the visible area.

If I want to move one or more nodes in any direction outside of the area I’m viewing (typically further right or further down) then I have to click-and-hold to select the nodes, then move my mouse into a space adjacent to the scrollbar about 1 pixel wide. If I can’t place my mouse on exactly that line then the workflow won’t scroll. A fix would be great!!

Thanks for your patience indulging my rants!

quaeler · February 28, 2019, 3:41am

Hi - from back to front - oh yes, it is a long standing complaint that dragging nodes out of the viewport is not user friendly; for 3.7.0 we did some internal testing of alternates but nothing passed mustard. It continues to be an open and debated issue in KNIME.

For the workflow annotation, i attempted to repeat this in 3.7.1 with the above rat’s nest of workflow ( 10.7MB screen capture here: http://theori.st/take_away/knime/new_annotation_371.gif ) and was unable to (it worked as i expected it to - with the annotation being placed basic at the mouse down location of the right click.)

Could you give me some more clues to replicate that? (We should probably open that in a new thread too - so could you respond in a new forum thread?)