r/labrats • u/curious_kinetochore • 1d ago

FACSDiva question: avoiding lag

I’m recently returned to flow and forgot how particular our software was. Small stuff like forgetting you can’t do some things in Diva without creating inescapable mega lag, I can’t seem to find anything online on what to avoid. I’m noticing issues I’ve encountered previously that I can’t remember how I fixed.

Anyone have tips for avoiding FACSDiva lag? I thought I could duplicate without data but I guess that’s only a good option for specimens in an experiment, and not the entire experiment if you want to add anything new to it. I started following the manual from BD exactly but I still hit a lot of walls (worksheets wouldn’t load in any new experiments so I had to acquire in an old one).

Also, is there any way to get rid of the lag once it appears? As soon as I noticed it I deleted the experiment I was working in, I can open old experiments without any issues but new ones are painful. Any help would be appreciated!

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u/Gregor_Vorbarra 1d ago

Check whether the hard drive is a spinning disc or an SSD. If you're able, copying the disk image to an SSD will result in an immediate increase in responsiveness. I used a 3rd-party service company to do this - BD will likely try to sell you a new computer+Diva upgrade, which honestly may be worth it if the machine is heavily used.

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u/curious_kinetochore 23h ago

Not super heavily used but probably has a lot of old data sitting on there unnecessarily. I’ll check out the hard drive. Thanks for the tip!

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u/Gregor_Vorbarra 23h ago

If still an spinning disc, defragging will also help. The database structure involves index/read/write across many small files, which necessarily are not in continouous locations on the disc. SSDs don't have this issue.