Updates 2018/06/26

Finished some major refactoring related to loading and saving flows. Well, actually replacing an ugly hack from two years ago with a clean implementation. Properly decoupling user interface and readers/writers for flows. That and some further optimizations in the Flow editor resulted in nice speed improvements: a flow with 38,000 actors now loads in about 3 seconds on my laptop. BTW this is the largest flow that I have generated so far!

Further CPU profiling also revealed some other code locations which could be optimized, improving startup time of flows.

Fixes

  • The Preview browser now properly updates the display when selecting a different handler for serialized object.

  • SetManyVariables standalone and transformer now use a list internally, which improves performance of the addVariablePair method when setting hundreds of variables.

  • User interface improvements in the Flow editor that relate to long running background tasks, they no longer block the interface.

  • General Flow editor improvements to speed things up with flows that have 10s of thousands of actors.

  • The Switch and IfThenElse actor now clean up the current token once execution finishes, to avoid unnecessary memory usage.

Changes

  • The Image viewer now uses a multi-page instead of multi-tab interface as well.

  • Copy/paste of flow nodes now uses a custom DataFlavour on the clipboard to speed up checks whether pasting is available; added "Copy (plain text)" for old approach.

  • Switched to sizeofag 1.0.4. This enabled the Inspect memory sub menu in the Flow editor, displaying the memory consumption of the selected actor (detailed per class or just overall size).

  • An alternative visualvm executable can be specified now by the user through preferences (or the JVisualVM.props properties file). JVisualVM got dropped from JDKs starting with Java 9. The project is now maintained separately and you can download it from here: https://visualvm.github.io/

  • adams-rsync: upgraded rsync4j to 3.1.2-10.

  • adams-rats: a Rat actor can free up memory now with the wrapUpAfterExecution flag, which is available in conjunction with performLazySetup.

  • adams-weka and adams-weka-lts: upgraded to matrix-algorithms 0.0.4.

  • adams-webservice: upgraded Apache CXF to 3.2.5.

Additions

  • Added simple source actor for just keep the flow running: Idle. This is useful when using an event-based flow (eg using Rat actors) rather than a data driven one.

  • The ForceFlush control actor enforces actors implementing FlushSupporter (currently DumpFile and WekaInstanceDumper) to flush their buffers.

  • With the ArrayToChunks transformer you can split an array into sub-arrays of a specified length.

  • adams-weka and adams-weka-lts: meta-classifier that can use a fallback model for making predictions: Fallback

  • adams-rats: the ExecuteRats control actor allows execution of Rat actors in MANUAL mode whenever a token passes through.

  • adams-compress: added support for Zstd de/compression library (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zstd).

  • adams-spectral-2dim-core: added the MaxWaves outlier detector for enforcing an upper limit on wave numbers.

  • adams-spectral-3way-core: added support for feature generation through the ThreeWayDataFeatureGenerator transformer and its associated class hierarchy of feature generators.