OpenGeofiction
Hey you guys,
Most of the time JOSM works just fine, but when I zoom in to a scale of a couple of meters, the programm becomes unbearably slow. At first I thought it had something to do with my laptop or perhaps the areas I downloaded, but then user BartleDuc contacted me, telling me he had the same problems when tried to zoom in to make a detailed train station. Yesterday I received a message from user azerty2935, who wondered why JOSM stopped working whenever he zoomed in on his Island nation, so it seems to be a common problem.
If have used JOSM in the past without any complications and I used high zoom a lot for the more detailed work in my towns and cities, also without any problems. These issues the three of us have are a recent thing, They have been bothering me for the last couple of weeks.
So I wondered if any of you experience the same difficulties when working with JOSM and if any of you have some good tips to solve these problems,
Thanks in advance,
TRJ
Discussion
Comment from oscar2002 on 18 September 2016 at 09:33
Durante estos días he estado editando a niveles de zoom muy bajos, para el detalle de Ilíberis, y JOSM no me ha dado ningún problema… (estoy usando la versión 10526, y si debería actualizar…)
Comment from Turnsole80 on 18 September 2016 at 14:45
Oh, you have it too? I thought it was just my ancient computer throwing a tantrum :P
Comment from niels20020 on 18 September 2016 at 18:55
I’ve had the same problem, but it looks like it’s fixed now.
Comment from Thunderbird on 18 September 2016 at 19:30
I am having the exact same problem! I never did have that problem until recently. So I tried it on another computer, same thing. I zoom in and it becomes extremely slow. It could be the new update.
This is quite annoying because I crave accuracy in my mapping, so I like to try and measure things out to an exact distance for example. I zoom in to do this, and it is very hard for me to do so.
@niels20020: It is not fixed for me, it is still happening.
Comment from azerty2935 on 18 September 2016 at 20:28
JOSM has been self-updating without notifying, looks like makers of the app had a rough time patching it, and they broke the app itself.
It’s also not fixed for me, it’s simply shyte.
Comment from Luciano on 18 September 2016 at 22:41
I have been having some issues with JOSM, and they may be related to those being described here. I recently migrated my home desktop environment to an Ubuntu Linux platform, and I’ve had a number of issues related to system config, one of which is related to mouse control, which of course is critical for JOSM. I was assuming my JOSM problems were related to that, but this makes me wonder if I’ve got more than one thing going on.
In fact, I have always had some issues with JOSM on high zooms, especially if a large map is loaded. I’m not sure exactly why having large datasets at high zooms creates more problems, but my guess is that it has to do with how it handles the on-the-fly renders (i.e. at high zooms, it renders the whole area covered, not just what’s in the window, and for large datasets, that’s a killer situation). It’s not really a bug, but rather just a “fact of life” given how the application is designed. The best thing to keep in mind is to separate “detail mapping” activity from “wide area mapping” activity to separate JOSM sessions, and for detail mapping always only load small areas.
As far as JOSM “self-updating without notifying” - that’s quite strange, and seems unlikely, to be honest, given the design of the application. I might try to open up my windows desktop and see how JOSM behaves there.
I’m currently on version 10966 on both windows and linux.
Comment from Thunderbird on 19 September 2016 at 00:29
@Luciano: My JOSM is definitely self-updating without notifying me. As far as your theory on why JOSM is slow when zoomed in, that could be why. I think you’re on to something.
Comment from Luciano on 19 September 2016 at 01:28
@Thunderbird - so are you saying the whole install of JOSM on your machine is automatically updating to a higher version number without asking your permission? I didn’t know JOSM was even capable of that. On Linux, if I set my software and packages manager to the right settings, the OS will update JOSM automatically. But that’s an OS feature, not a JOSM feature, and can be switched on or off in the software manager in Linux. On Windows, I don’t quite see how this would even happen.
If it’s just plugins updating, there are some settings in the advanced preferences that can change that behavior: maybe “pluginmanager.time-based-update-policy”.
One question - how do you “start” JOSM? I have an icon on my desktop, and I start it like any other desktop application - always. I know that “web start” is possible, under the java architecture, and I was surfing around online just now and read something to the effect that using “web start” includes automatic updating. Is this related to using the “edit with remote control” option on our map view? I confess I’ve never used it - I don’t trust it, as I’d rather have more control over how JOSM fires up and runs on my system.
Comment from Ūdilugbulgidħū on 19 September 2016 at 07:45
Since my OS is windows XP I can’t update to the most recent Java … hence I run an old version of JOSM. In the old version there have always been issues with slow running in big datasets, especially at high zooms, as Luciano commented. There’s nothing to be done on this. Only note that using relations rather than polygons minimises numbers of ways and lets you edit over bigger areas - or for a longer time - on the same original file.
Comment from dryerlint on 19 September 2016 at 10:53
Thank god someone else has this issue, I was starting to get a bit worried. JOSM lags so much at high zooms that I haven’t done any editing for a few weeks at all.
It does look like this issue came with a recent update, since I never had any problems before a few weeks ago.
Comment from Thunderbird on 19 September 2016 at 13:16
@Luciano: Yes, I run Windows 10 on my machine (another automatic update from Windows 7 without my permission), and JOSM is installed. I use the remote control function and press edit while looking at the map to download an area. I’ve never used web start.
My JOSM definitely updates on its own, I remember having to manually update and it no longer prompts me to do so, always starting with the latest version.
Comment from Luciano on 19 September 2016 at 14:34
@Thuderbird, My point in asking about using the remote control option is that that is probably exactly what “web start” means. So my guess is that if you use “remote control” you are using what is also called “web start”, which could lead to automatic updating.
@dryerlint, what we need to bear in mind about JOSM is that it is intended for editing OSM. One huge difference between OSM and OGF is that there is almost never any need, at this point, to be editing a large area in OSM. The map is sufficiently “filled” that all edits are small, local edits. Thus, if they roll out some program changes or upgrades that create lag times when editing large areas at low zooms, it’s possible their testing team never even noticed, or if they did notice, they dismissed it as a non-problem.
Comment from dryerlint on 19 September 2016 at 20:24
@Luciano Good point. I did notice, when I first started editing, that it was pretty difficult to get large areas downloaded into JOSM. However, surely this is the opposite problem? It lags at high zooms, not low ones, right?
Comment from Luciano on 19 September 2016 at 22:59
@dryerlint - right, it lags on high zooms, but … only if for large datasets. Nevertheless, if you download just a few hectares, and work on it at high zoom, you’ll have no problem. The problem is that JOSM has to render everything as you work, and for large datasets, at high zooms, that’s a lot of processing. It seems like a paradox, but actually makes sense. Once, I had my entire country of Ardisphere loaded, and I made the stupid decision to try to edit some subway platforms, thus zooming in to the meter-level scale. I crashed my computer. This was before the recent version updates, which, based on comments above, may have made the problem worse.
The general advice, repeating what I said before, might be:
For large-area edits in JOSM, avoid detail work. For detail work, download only the area where you intend to work. This is my current work pattern, and it avoids problem. Even tiny Tárrases is a quite large dataset because of all the detail, nowadays, and I can no longer edit all the individual buildings with the whole country (all 30 km x 15 km of it!) loaded.
Comment from dryerlint on 20 September 2016 at 02:12
Huh. I didn’t think that JOSM rendered everything, even the offscreen stuff. That seems like a pretty big design flaw, to be honest.
Thank you for the advice, though! I’ll try and download smaller areas from now on.
Comment from Luciano on 20 September 2016 at 02:44
@dryerlint
I don’t actually know that that’s what JOSM is doing. I’m guessing, because it explains the behavior. I don’t really know the details of how it works. It may go on some kind of “spiral outward from area of focus, render as you go” algorithm. Obviously it has to “pre-render” some of what’s beyond your window, to be ready for scrolling. But with so much territory to cover, it may not have an effective way of deciding when it needs to stop, or it may be that the “spiral out” algorithm is constrained by some absolute distance rather than a relative distance, so on high zooms the constraint stops being useful.
That said, I still am not sure it should be seen as a flaw. From the OSM perspective, I would think a lot of people would see loading large data sets and then floating around doing random, highly detailed edits would be seen as something to be actively prevented. People who do that would be seen as undisciplined mappers who should be discouraged and pushed in the direction of a more systematic approach, to ensure high quality mapping. So while I doubt JOSM is intentionally designed to prevent that kind of behavior, I also could be sympathetic to those who might say, “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”
Comment from azerty2935 on 23 September 2016 at 22:44
Downloading a smaller (really smaller) area to work on is not helping me. It still is sluggish.
Comment from Luciano on 23 September 2016 at 23:09
@azerty2935 - Hm. If you’re referring to sluggishness in JOSM during drawing and scrolling, I would start looking at the rest of your system config. JOSM Is very memory intensive, even for small areas. Just firing up JOSM (with a few hectares loaded) uses about 600-800 MB of memory on my system, out of 4 GB RAM. If I’m running some other memory intensive application (notably, Firefox is a terrible memory hog, with notorious leaks; also, I generally have a spreadsheet open e.g. LibreOffice, where I keep naming lists and data I reference while mapping), I can end up with a sluggish system pretty easily.
You might try closing other applications, and running JOSM on an otherwise “empty” system and see if you still have issues. You could also try upping the CPU priority for JOSM in comparison to other applications running.
If you’re referring to sluggishness in download/upload speeds, this might be a problem with your ISP, and not with JOSM.