[Xastir] Re: recent cvs: Works good...

[Curt Mills]

On Mon, 20 Sep 2004, Gerry Creager N5JXS wrote:

> 1.  Apparently you've solved the problems associated with the latest
> round of ImageMagick API fubars.  Works good now.  I've, once again, got
> radar, Tiger, etc.

Unintentional, I assure you.  Sure it wasn't IM putting out enough
small bug-fix releases to get back on track themselves?


> 2.  I saw no issue with excessive CPU utilization including when radar
> or Tiger loads were ongoing.  That said,...

Lots of profiling has happened recently, and lots of corresponding
small code changes.


> 3.  When radar or Tiger are loading, the program appears to steal a lot
> of normal cycles and doesn't appear to service interrupts much at all.

I believe what you are seeing is the ImageMagick loading routine
taking up all the time.  I've noticed that before with your large
radar image.  It's the main reason I don't tend to use that radar
image anymore:  I didn't like my whole Linux box locking up every
few minutes.

Moving it to another thread would take a bit of work, roughly
similar to how we do the GPS track downloading in a separate thread.
We'd have to spawn off a thread, set a flag when we're done, then go
back and update our weather alerts and symbols/tracks on top of
that.  We'd also have to take care that we don't start another map
redraw operation at the same time, but perhaps this could be an
advantage as we could kill the current thread and restart another,
making the map drawing more interruptible.

I suppose we could move ALL of the display area draws to another
thread, in which case the main thread would be detached from any
drawing.  We'd then just have to communicate with the map-draw
thread enough to instigate a new draw, to interrupt the current
draw, etc.  Might be fun trying to figure out what should go in each
thread, and would be a lot of work to get there.

-- 
Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo dot 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!"