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From: kdd@well.UUCP (Keith David Doyle)
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Pay for Performance
Message-ID: <1904@well.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 9-Oct-86 14:11:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: well.1904
Posted: Thu Oct  9 14:11:15 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 10-Oct-86 01:27:15 EDT
Reply-To: kdd@well.UUCP (Keith David Doyle)
Organization: Whole Earth Lectronic Link, Sausalito CA
Lines: 63

References:


[.........]

Some of the recent discussion about terminal emulator performance reminds
me of a few things I have noticed lately, in regards to performance in
general.

Some of you may have come across one of Dale Lucks little utilities, a
program called 'PM' (for Performance Monitor) which I recently ran across
on a local BBS.  (thanx Dale!)

I've found PM to be a darn useful utility, as it gives you a little 
'chart recorder' style graph of the CPU idle time, and the chip memory
usage.  There may be other performance monitor programs out there that
do similar things.

From using PM, I've found that you can VERY EASILY pinpoint the programs
that *poll* instead of Wait() for events.  When you run a program that
polls, the CPU idle time goes directly to ZERO (do not pass go, do not
collect $200).

Online! is one that polls.  A-Talk on the other hand, obviously does a
Wait(), as the CPU idle graph, when A-Talk is up but not doing anything,
is the same as it is when A-Talk is not up at all.

Also, the utility SeeILBM polls, (though I've hacked mine so that it 
dosen't anymore).  I noticed this originally when I was using it to 
display a picture on the screen while I was doing a Kermit multi-file
transfer, and found that the transfer time went WAY down when the picture
was on the screen.  GAK!  Glad I had the source to SeeILBM.  Don't have the
source to Online!, time to switch to VT100 I guess.

PM (or similar utilities) are sure handy when evaluating the behavior of
various programs, particularly under multitasking.  I find that I do a lot
of multitasking when I am using terminal programs, so it is important to
me that they do not hog any more CPU than they have to.

In addition, I hope that if more of you out there make use of such utilities,
that the awareness level of such issues will become high enough so that 
we will see fewer and fewer programs that are *ill-behaved* in a multi-tasking
environment.

Ideally, if when an Amiga magazine does a review of a new software product,
it would be nice if they would include basic information of this type just
as a matter of course.  That would force just about everybody to produce
more *well-behaved* programs for the machine.  Otherwise, what we don't know
won't hurt us???

If you look at the stereo magazines, when they rate a new stereo, or whatever,
they run all sorts of laboratory tests against them, to test S/N ratio, 
wow & flutter, etc.  Perhaps some multi-tasking performance tests could be
a software version of this.

So, at any rate, see if you can locate a copy of PM (or maybe Dale will post
it to mod.amiga.sources or somewhere, I don't remember it coming across the
net though I could be wrong), and test some of your favorite programs to see
just what they are doing when they seem to be doing *nothing*.  I found it
a great little utility and pop it up all the time to see just what the heck
is going on in there.

Keith Doyle
#  {ucbvax,ihnp4,decvax}!trwrb!cadovax!keithd
#  cadovax!keithd@ucla-locus.arpa
"You'll PAY to know what you REALLY pay!"