In recent months several customers have reported significant slow-downs in their Windows UI Toolkit applications when upgrading to Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016. We’ve been researching this issue, and we believe that much of the slow down resulted from alterations that Microsoft made in the operating system to mitigate the Windows Spectre-Meltdown issues.

In an attempt to mitigate these performance changes, and working in conjunction with one customer that had reported the issue to us, we have been working on various performance optimizations in the Synergy runtime related to low-level window creation, and for the Toolkit file-stack routines when using large lists. The new runtime also has UI improvements related to scaling of fonts on high-DPI monitors, most notably when moving a toolkit application between monitors with different DPI settings in Windows 10. This work is now complete, and we believe it has resulted in significant improvements in performance, which we hope will largely restore previous levels of performance.

We have performed as much internal testing as possible, and the customer we have been working with has also reported good results when testing the new runtime. We would like to be able to ship these improvements in the next Synergy release in the May timeframe, but before we can do that, we need to have several other Windows UI Toolkit developers validate that the changes do not cause any other unforeseen issues in their applications.

What we are asking you to do is to install your application onto a Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016 (or higher) that has Synergy 11.1.1c installed, apply a special runtime patch that we will provide, and test your application. There is no need to re-compile your code; just run your application in the patched 11.1.1c environment and look for any UI issues. You would be looking for any visual anomalies in the UI Toolkit user interface, regions not being painted or cleared correctly, etc.

We believe that our recent runtime changes can deliver significant runtime performance improvements for a lot of users, but because of the significant nature of the internal changes, we need help validating those changes in real user scenarios.

Can you help? If so please contact us as soon as possible, either via Developer Support or through your Synergex Account Representative.