Hi Geoff,
Sorry I haven't gotten back to you...didn't see the post till tonight!

I'll try and take a look at it sometime this week.

Although I'm a little baffled on the performance hit, as there wasn't a
great deal changed. It may have to do with the TLabel itself and the
various positioning and alignments...not sure.

thanks for taking the time to test it.

Mark

Geoff Worboys wrote:

>>The "original" intention was to allow the developer to change
>>the font colour.
>>
>>
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>>Perhaps 3 basic properties instead of a TFont would be
>>sufficient:
>>FontColour
>>FontName
>>FontSize
>>
>>
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>>and "maybe" style?
>>
>>
>
>Its one of those issues - the one thing you dont include will
>be the one thing that someone else wants. ;-)
>
>What it really needs is some test or definite information about
>exactly what impact the full TFont instance will incur.
>
>So in that light I just did a very basic test demo. I placed
>500 TIB_Edit controls with visible labels on a form. most were
>not showing very much (I just let them sit where a copy/paste
>sat them). But I figured this was an easy way to see how things
>went.
>
>The difference in executable memory consumption (using TaskMgr
>on WinXP) was about 20k. That is; the new AutoLabels use about
>20k more than the old - whether labels were visible or not.
>
>For 500 controls I do not see this as significant (40 bytes per
>control instance). So the existence of the TFont property does
>not seem important (IMO).
>
>
>HOWEVER, there was a performance hit when labels were visible!
>
>When I open the dataset (using the TIB_DatasetBar) at runtime:
> with the old AutoLabels, open took < 1 second to complete
> with the new AutoLabels, open took > 10 seconds to complete
>
>This was just measured with the second hand on the clock next
>to my PC, so its not that accurate. But the scale of the
>difference is definite.
>
>I do see this as significant (500 controls on one form is not
>likely, so its probably not hugely significant, but still
>something worth investigating).
>
>Since the performance hit was only when labels were visible
>the implication is that this is not to do with the TFont object
>but probably something to with how the label is updated.
>
>
>Can I let you take it from here Mark? I dont do much VCL/IBO
>stuff these days, so I cant really spend more time looking at
>the issues.
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