[AG-TECH] Display Machine Performance

[Osland, CD (Chris)]

If there's one thing worse than having to confess you've screwed
up, it's having to confess it to a world-wide audience!

Here goes.

All my comments about the latest Matrox drivers for G200
and G450 improving Display machine performance are probably
wrong.  Art Ziarko [aziarko at insors.com] asked me whether I had
looked at CPU utilization before and after.  I hadn't before but have
just spent a couple of hours doing so after.

The first thing I spotted (not difficult) was that utilization was 100%
however many video frames were open (including zero!).  Second
thing was the APServe was taking all available cycles.  As I mentioned,
we took the opportunity of AP-Ware running under W2000 to junk
the W98 machine and run AP-Ware in the Display machine.  Looks
like that little application thrashes around and is what is causing
us the problem.  If I kill off APserve, no sticky windows.  If I restart
it, sticky windows again.

If anyone knows whether there's a fix to this, do say.  I'll be contacting
Gentner to see if they are aware of this behaviour, and whether they
have a fix.

So I really don't know whether the new Matrox drivers are a good idea;
we always had the problem before (but were always running AP-Ware)
and when I did the tests on the Display machine (naturally, as I was
testing for video performance) I didn't bother starting AP-Ware.

Just for the record, on our AMD Athlon 1.4 GHz

	30 'small' video frames + Lobby thumbnails = 100%
	23 'small' video frames = 77%
	27 'small' + 1 'medium' + Lobby thumbnails = 93%
	4 'large' + Test Room thumbnails (about 16) = 40%

[all the above with AP-Ware not running!]

Cheers

Chris O

____________________________________________________________________
Chris Osland                                               Office tel: +44
(0) 1235 446565
Digital Media and Access Grid                          Medialab tel: +44 (0)
1235 446459
BIT Department                                     Access Grid room tel: +44
(0) 1235 445666
e-mail:   C.D.Osland at rl.ac.uk                                       Fax: +44
(0) 1235 445597
CLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (Bldg. R18)
Chilton, DIDCOT, Oxon OX11 0QX, UK
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