PrestoSoft Community

By mistake I lauched the compare of two huge and very different binary files.
I clicked the cancel button, I clicked again and again and again...

After about a minute I killed the process through the task manager.
Is it possible to have EDP being more responsive to the cancel command?

There's always a trade-of between sensitivity of the Cancel button and performance. Depending on the stage of comparison, cancellation may be faster or slower. Do you remember what the progress bar was saying when you tried to cancel the comparison?

The two files are about 8 MB each.
At the beginning the progress bas says "Converting files to hex strings": cancel is ignored.
Then it says "Comparing files": cancel is ignored.
Then, much later, "Out of memory while trying to allocate 244,2 MB.: Not enough space. Do you want to simply determine whether the files are different without using too much memory?"

I think that, at least when switching from the first to the second step and from the second step to the third, a test of the cancel can be done without a big impact on performances.
Furthermore, if I already clicked "cancel", EDP can safely skip the whole prompt "Do you want to simply determine whether the files are different without using too much memory?".

N.B. Of course Win2000 on a slow machine makes things worse...

We'll make necessary improvements in the next version. In the meantime you can somewhat improve the UI sensitivity by reducing the following value under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\PrestoSoft\ExamDiff Pro\Settings in your Windows Registry:

"PeekMessage Tick Increment"

Thank you.

Revisiting this thread to note that CANCEL is unresponsive when comparing large nested directories with many files.

As IO is significantly slower than processing, checking the state of the cancel button before reading the next file should not adversely affect performance.

Sometimes pressing esc is more effective than clicking "cancel".