Plugin is very slow to start

[adamltyson]

I will try to see if I can reproduce this on other machines, but on my Ubuntu 20.04 machine, the plugin takes a very long time to start (~20s). Other plugins start as normal.

[NicoKiaru]

Agreed. It's not horrible but a bit weird that it takes so long (tested on Win11 and on a flavor of Linux in a VM)

[adamltyson]

This is also the same with the atlas manager widget, so not sure what's going on here.

[adamltyson]

FYI I profiled adding the atlas manager widget. I'm none the wiser though.

[alessandrofelder]

Thanks - what I would naively take from it is: out of the 24 seconds it takes to add the widget to napari, it takes 12 seconds each to

• downloading and reading the text file with the latest version from GIN
• formatting the atlas names into more readable form
  ?
  

A possible improvement for the first part would be to cache the latest versions locally, and have a button that checks for updates remotely? So this is not done every time (GIN is not going to change daily) see #127

We could also precompute the legible name if that function is so slow?

[adamltyson]

I'm not sure that's the problem. I think getting the latest versions takes 2ms, but it's taken a total of 12 seconds before it gets to that point.

[adamltyson]

This returns 1.92e-05, so I don't think this function is to blame!

import timeit

start = timeit.timeit()
from brainglobe_atlasapi.list_atlases import get_all_atlases_lastversions
versions = get_all_atlases_lastversions()
end = timeit.timeit()
print(end - start)

[alessandrofelder]

Right, OK, that makes more sense - thanks.
IIRC my suspicion at the time was that instantiating and populating the Qt TableModel object was slow