Panorama falling asleep?

Panorama X
1

PAN 10.2b1

I recently upgraded to a new iMac with Apple M4 chip and Sequoia OS 15.5

After transferring my pan files from the old computer, I have everything set up and running fine, except for one (as far as I know) problem. Panorama seems to fall asleep if left alone for a while.

I usually have several files open at one time. I’ve run into this problem with all of them. When I’ve gone away for awhile, not necessarily long enough for the computer to go to sleep, but that, too, if I hit a button on one of the files, I get the beach ball of doom. I have to wait many seconds for the procedure to do its thing. If I click the button, or any button, afterwards, the procedure runs with lightning speed, as expected.

Not a big deal, but attention getting. Is this something in Pan or the OS? Anyone else seeing this?

So far, haven’t noticed this problem with other apps.

2

I use Panorama X on Sequoia and have never seen this behavior, and haven’t heard any other reports of this.

3

I’ve had no problems with Panorama falling asleep but have seen over the last couple of months that Safari performs as you describe, during which the Mac also becomes unresponsive for 20 or 30 seconds. Restarting Safari eliminates the problem for a few days. I’m still using OS 15.4 so I’ll upgrade today and hope for the best.

4

This is no issue of Panorama X “falling asleep”. It is an issue how macOS handles idling apps. macOS tries to regain RAM from idling apps for other processes. So it is really not a good idea to let this RAM based database application idle for a longer time.

5

Technically, all apps are RAM based.

If your computer is short on memory and an app isn’t used for a while, macOS will reclaim some or all of the memory the app is using for other apps. It does this first by compressing the memory. If that’s not enough, it will write the contents of the memory to the disk. Then when you make the app active again, macOS will restore the contents of memory by reading from the disk and uncompressing if needed. This restoration takes some time. Usualy it’s not enough time to cause a beachball, at least if your computer has a fast SSD drive. If you are still using a hard drive you will definitely get beachballs during this process.

So it is really not a good idea to let this RAM based database application idle for a longer time.

I don’t agree that this is a bad idea. There’s no possibility of data loss, just of delays. There are three possible strategies to reduce these delays.

  • Get a computer with more memory
  • Get a faster SSD drive
  • Use fewer apps at the same time

My computer has 64GB of memory and a very fast internal SSD drive, so I don’t see any delays even when running several dozen apps at once. But on a computer with lesser specs you may want to run fewer apps at the same time.

Also, this question originally threw me because you were asking about Panorama specifically. There’s nothing specific to Panorama about this behavior, it’s a feature of macOS and could happen with any app.

Also, the original question makes it sound like Panorama is the foreground app the whole time. If that’s the case, then none of this applies. If an app is in the foreground, macOS will not compress or write the memory to disk. This only happens if you start using other applications. So if you are leaving Panorama running, just not touching your computer for a while, you shouldn’t see any delay when you resume.

FYI, I will sometimes come back to Panorama after leaving it idling for as long as a day (or even more on a weekend). It always comes back at full speed immediately.

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