I have lightburn installed on two PCs - my desktop where I do the design/make the files, and the workshop PC that is hooked up to the laser (XTool S1). Both exhibit the same behavior.
Desktop is Windows 11, workshop is W10. Desktop is a 13th gen i7, 32gb ram, fast NVME ssd etc, workshop is some old 4th gen i5 with 8gb of ram. I don’t think it’s hardware related as the only common component would be Intel CPU
Whenever Lightburn is open - whether there is a design open or a blank canvas, whether its connected to the laser or not - it tanks my system responsiveness. The mouse moves incredibly jerky, keystrokes sometimes “misfire” or “bunch up” and I have to wait for the buffer to clear for the keys to appear on screen. Weirdly, CPU/Memory/GPU usage don’t increase at all.
This doesn’t just happen in Lightburn, but every piece of software that is open when Lightburn is open.
This happens worst when the software is first open and will persist for 3-5 minutes, then it gets more sporadic but still happens.
It’s less bad with antialiasing disabled, less bad with curve quality at absolute lowest, but still difficult to use - just closing lightburn to write the rest of the message, I missed the ‘X’ three times!
I don’t think it’s inherent to Lightburn. I frequently run Lightburn and Gimp or Lightburn and Autodesk Inventor simultaneously. Sometimes all three. Throw in either Chrome or Firefox many times as well. Unless I’m doing something ridiculous, my win10/i7/16GB/Nvidia laptop chugs along happily.
I’ve been crook as a dog, so I did not get a chance to check anything out until today.
I enabled the debug log, and was able to see it is pinging my bluetooth adapter… a lot.
13:03:42.436 D: Manufacturer: “Microsoft”
13:03:42.436 D: Product: “Standard Serial over Bluetooth link”
13:03:42.436 D: Name: “COM4”
13:03:42.436 D: Port open failed
13:03:42.436 D: – candidate port PID 0 VID 0
13:03:42.436 D: mfr: “Microsoft”
13:03:42.436 D: prod: “Standard Serial over Bluetooth link”
13:03:42.436 D: name: “COM5”
13:03:42.691 D: – candidate port PID 0 VID 0
13:03:42.691 D: mfr: “Microsoft”
13:03:42.691 D: prod: “Standard Serial over Bluetooth link”
13:03:42.691 D: name: “COM4”
13:03:42.691 D: - found matching port name
I’m unsure why it thinks there are two of them, but thats a minor issue. Every time Lightburn gets laggy, if I pull out the bluetooth dongle its instantly faster/smooth as butter. Reinserting the bluetooth dongle doesn’t make it laggy - at least for an hour or two afterwards. It seems like Lightburn is probing that COM port and the response is just slow or timing out - a mixture of software and hardware playing up I guess.
Unfortunately my keyboard connects via Bluetooth.
Is there a way to ‘blacklist’ a device inside Lightburn so it doesn’t try it? Alternatively I might have to try and find a different bluetooth dongle.
By creating a PortExclude.txt file in the prefs folder you should be able to exclude the problem COM ports. That might prevent them from being referenced but not sure which of these activities takes precedence.
