Very poor performance when moderately large missions are loaded

[rubenp02]

Current Behavior

When working with moderately large missions (of maybe around 250+ simple waypoints, probably more than the typical use case but still much less than what is currently supported in the main autopilot firmwares), QGroundControl becomes very unresponsive to the point of being unusable, particularly in the Plan View and in low end devices such as Android GCS. In the latter case it can and does crash at any moment, making it unsuitable for operations where the GCS is critical.

Expected Behavior

Adequate performance and stability, at least up to 600 waypoints, which is what ArduPilot supports without an external SD card. Or at the very least the performance of the current QGC stable, where this issue isn't nearly as bad. The model size of even a huge mission is very manageable by any system, so this seems to be due to very innefficient rendering or unnecessary view updates.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Create and load a mission with a large number of simple waypoints
2. Pan the view, scroll down the waypoint list, etc.
3. The performance will be abysmal at this point. If using an Android GCS, the app will crash within a few minutes.

System Information

• QGC Version: current master

Sample mission

test-250-simple-wp-mission.zip

[HTRamsey]

Are you able to run the QML Profiler? If not I will do so at some point. I'm not really aware of anything that's changed with any of the mission/plan view stuff so I'll have to look into it further

[rubenp02]

I was going to do it and try and fix the issue but I don't have much time at the moment, so I figured I'd just report the issue. I'll do it later if I can

[HTRamsey]

Haven't tried on Android yet but at least on a high end Linux it works fine. It looks like it is likely MissionItemEditor that is causing the problem though

[rubenp02]

Maybe is something Windows/Android related, then? I haven't done any profiling but the issue is immediately obvious when compared to the latest stable.

[DonLakeFlyer]

Unless there is some specific control that has gone whacky there isn't much different in the Plan view Stable -> Daily.

[DonLakeFlyer]

Tried OSX, don't see anything out of the ordinary

[DonLakeFlyer]

Windows is working fine for me as well with the example plan from above

[DonLakeFlyer]

Herelink seems fine as well. Scrolling the waypoint list up/down is a little sluggish but still workable.

[rubenp02]

Seems like it might be an issue on my end... I'll see if I can find out the reason this week

[DonLakeFlyer]

Still odd you would see it on multiple OS

[rubenp02]

I'm not able to properly look into it at the moment but here's a video of the issue on a high end Windows:
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/17d23014-ea1d-4526-a5e6-6227bbceb5a0

That's the latest 4.4.3 release vs a Release build of the latest master commit at the time of this comment. Note that on the right (latest master) I'm trying to do exactly what I do on the left, but the view is completely stalled. Then I try the drag gestures which seem ever so slightly more responsive but still what I consider to be completely unusable. I've also done the same test shown in the video while running the QML debugger on a Profile build:

latest-master-250-wp-performance.zip

As you can imagine, on a Skydroid H16 you can't even pan the view at all, let alone edit the mission, and even if you just want to load it and go back to the Fly View the app crashes within minutes. I have also tried the installer artifact from the 9beae12 Windows test workflow and was able to replicate the problem there as well. That being said, if neither of you are seeing the same issue, I guess it must somehow be a problem on my end.

[DonLakeFlyer]

@rubenp02 Can you try setting 'cacheBuffer' to 0 here: https://github.com/mavlink/qgroundcontrol/blob/master/src/PlanView/PlanView.qml#L755

Run it with the profile as well and provide output like you did above.

[rubenp02]

The performance is a lot better but still pretty bad. Panning the map is now responsive, and the WP list is a lot smoother but still not usable as the attached video shows. You can see I also get a bug where clicking the last waypoint actually opens one of the first elements in the mission, scrolling back the list to almost the beginning.

cacheBuffer-0-performance-test-master.mp4

And here's the profiling output:

cacheBuffer-0-latest-master-250-wp-performance.zip