[Xastir] disgruntaled with Xastir...ditched Suse

[Curt, WE7U]

On Tue, 7 Sep 2004, Richard E. Polivka wrote:

> ke4lkq wrote:
>
> >Why is Xastir using 60 to 80 percent of the cpu time??

I see bursts up to there, but most of the time it is running quite
low.  Running SuSE 9.0 here.


> >Occured since cvs of last week or so and just got worse day before yesterday.
> >Any way to see what processes are being used??  How does one "debug" this in
> >linux or see whats going on?

We're using threads instead of processes for most things.  I
investigated trying to rename threads so that you'd be able to tell
the difference between them using "top" or "ps".  From the little
investigation I did, I don't believe it is possible.  I did manage
to rename the server process and it's children, so if you type "c"
in top or do a "ps", you can tell which they are.

If you start Xastir up without any interfaces and with the server
disabled, you'll have one process.  Turn on one interface and you'll
get three more threads created, one read, one write, and a
supervisory thread.  Turn off that interface and the supervisory
thread will stay, but the read/write threads will go away.

Typically the main thread will be the one using the most CPU, as it
does the packet decoding, map drawing, etc.  It will also typically
be the lowest process number, unless you made it to the high process
numbers and are rolling over to the low ones again.


> I ditched Suse 9.0 because by itself, it is a CPU hog. Xastir puts a
> load on the system when processing radar files and shapefiles. The delay
> was unbearable with both. Ditched Suse and went back to my old standby
> Slackware 10.0 and the system became manageable. Xastir dogs when
> processing the weather radar and the counties but other than that, all
> is fine for a 266 MHz PII.

I have a couple of Slackware systems but am not using them
currently.  I haven't investigated whether SuSE uses more CPU than
Slackware.  I run Slackware on some systems in order to more finely
control how much disk space is used.

--
Curt, WE7U			         http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
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