[Xastir] xastir slows system after a while

[Curt Mills, WE7U]

On Sun, 23 Feb 2003, Greg Jurrens wrote:

> Is anyone else experiencing a slowdown in cpu performance after Xastir runs for a day or so?  Restarted Xastir and all is well again.  Have seen it twice but haven't instrumented to document it yet.  This is a build from Friday's CVS.

I've seen it at various stages in Xastir's history, and caused by
different things at different times.

1) I used to see it get into a mode where updating was very slow, but
by closing/restarting the active interfaces, it'd be fine again.
I haven't seen that one in quite a while, but it might still exist.

2) Another potential problem happens if you set the dead-reckoning
rate too high (by hand-editing the config file), zooming out to
the whole U.S. or more, and having a bunch of mobile stations on
the screen.  I did some tweaks to help minimize that one, but it
can still have some effect.

3) Yet another performance hit happens if you have 20,000+ stations/
objects in the database.  You can get that easily if you hook up
to firenet.  Xastir currently uses a linked-list to hold the station
information.  That gets unwieldy with thousands of stations.  It
really needs to be coded up to use hashes now instead of linked-
lists, or perhaps use a hash to get to the head of several linked
lists.  Another option might be to re-order the linked list so that
certain organizations needed for display are available.

Perhaps the best thing to do at this point though is to go after
Xastir-2, integrating the code with a real database engine.

Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo.com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
  Lotto:  A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown
Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U.
The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"