Zeus IDE

I'm in the process of evaulating Zeus and I'm impressed by all of the features. I had 3 questions, however:
1. SCC should be universal, correct? I'm trying to get it to work with Clearcase and am getting an "unspecified error". This is probably my problem, so I'll keep digging.
2. When I open my workspace (containing about 3000 files), building/parsing the ctags file seems to take about 10 minutes. However, if I build the file outside of Zeus it takes about 30 seconds. Is this some internal latency involved in Zeus parsing the file?
3. I saw a request in the forums for "find in files" output to a common window (much as is done in most other programs including MS visual studio). Did anything ever come of this request?

Thanks,
Chris

Hi Chris,

1. SCC should be universal, correct?

That is correct.

The Microsoft SCC interface is meant to be universal interface, but unfortunately it is also a closed specification, so in reality it is not always as universal as it could be

Imagine two development teams trying to develop systems that interface with each other, but are not allowed to talk to each other. This is Microsoft SCC

I'm trying to get it to work with Clearcase and am getting an "unspecified error".

To date the Zeus SCC has only been personally tested against Visual Source Safe, Perforce and CVS, so this could well be a problem with Zeus the implementation of SCC

To get a better understanding of what is going wrong I recommend doing the following:

1. Start Zeus
2. Try to connect to Clearcase
3. Use the Options, Macros, Macro Debug Output to display the SCC output
4. Post all the output information produced to this thread

With this extra debug information I will hopefully be able to offer some suggestions as to how to get the two to talk to each other.

2. When I open my workspace (containing about 3000 files), building/parsing the ctags file seems to take about 10 minutes. However, if I build the file outside of Zeus it takes about 30 seconds. Is this some internal latency involved in Zeus parsing the file?

I would have expected Zeus to be slower, but I definitely would not have expected such a big difference in times. The 10 minutes definitley seems like too long

What happens is Zeus takes the tags information produced by ctags and puts it into Sqlite database file. Zeus creates one database file (ie the *.zbd files) for each of the projects in the workspace.

So I am guessing with 3000 files in the workspace the Sqlite database file if going to be quite large. What I suspect might be happening is time gets consumed by the operating system in response to Zeus's requests for large amounts of memory that it requires to manage this database file.

What sort of RAM does your machine have

To better understand what is going on could you run these three tests.

Test One:

1. Workspace Options, Tags Panel
2. Check the Disable the automatic update of tags file option
3. Close and re-open and workspace
4. Take note of the time taken to open the workspace

Test Two:

1. With the workspace open use the Tags, Rebuild menu to do a full tags rebuild
2. Take note of the time taken to do the rebuild

Test Three:

1. With the workspace open use the Tags, Make menu to do a tags update
2. Take note of the time taken to do the make

The times for Test One + Test Two should be the 10 minutes you are seeing now.

I would also suspect most of this 10 minutes is taken up by the time needed for Test Two.

Finally the time for test Test Three should be a lot less than the time for Test Two.

If you post these three times that would help me greatly in trying to determine the cause for this excessive load time.

3. I saw a request in the forums for "find in files" output to a common window (much as is done in most other programs including MS visual studio). Did anything ever come of this request?

This is still on the Zeus todo list. At present the only workaround is to check the Attempt to re-use search output window option found in the find in files. As the name suggests, this option attempts to re-use the last used search output window.

Cheers Jussi

Actually I think I have the Clearcase SCC interface working now. I'll respond later if I continue to have problems.

As for your quesiton about my RAM, I have 1GB. I don't see tons of hard drive activity. But I have a dual core CPU and both cores are at about 50% CPU utilization during the process.

I'll try running the tests and get back to you.

Actually I think I have the Clearcase SCC interface working now.

That is good news

I'll try running the tests and get back to you.

To better understand the problem, I ran a simple test. I created a workspace containing a single project containing some 1200 c,cpp and h files. This resulted in the creation of a 6,608,896 byte Test.zbd Zeus database file.

On a machine of similar specification to yours, this full rebuild took about 2 minutes and the make took about 2 or 3 seconds and the workspace re-opened in about 10-20 seconds. These are the sorts of numbers I would expect to see

As to why this is not happening in your case I am not really sure

Are the source files located on a Lan

If this is the case, as a test I would suggest copying the source files to the local disk and creating a test workspace using the local files.

Zeus uses the access C runtime function to get the timestamps of the files and it uses this timstamp in the tags update process. If it is having trouble getting this timestamp information this would definitely cause the tags make to run slowly

Cheers Jussi

A few more comments/questions. I thought the number of files was 3000. It's actually around 5000. So the time difference between our respecitve rebuild times makes sense.

Questions/comments:
1. When I start the program, Zeus will do a "Make" or "Rebuild"? It seems that Zeus is doing a complete rebuild every time I start the program, because it takes minutes to start rather than seconds. I even unchecked "update the tag file on open" and "update tag file on save" with no change in the startup time. Perhaps this is just the program doing the conversion to its internal database and will happen no matter what I do?
2. In response to your question about the location of the files, they're all local.

1. When I start the program, Zeus will do a "Make" or "Rebuild"?

Zeus runs the tags make command when the workspace is open.

It seems that Zeus is doing a complete rebuild every time I start the program.

How the make works is it determines if a file needs to be tagged by comparing the timestamp of the file to that of the timestamp held in the database.

To make ensure that the database is not corrupt, I suggest trying the Tags Rebuild menu command. The rebuild wil first delete then re-create the tags database file.

Perhaps this is just the program doing the conversion to its internal database and will happen no matter what I do?

I have had one or two reports where the tags file is constantly being re-built. I have not yet been able to replicate this error, but I suspect what is going wrong is an incorrect timestamp is saved to the database and this causes the continual rebuild.

If the rebuild does not fix the issue, all I can suggest is turning of the automatic build option and then used the Tags Make menu to manually update the tags database

Jussi