Inkey$ - hogging CPU in win XP

[A.Basit A.Bulbulia]

Hi All !

I was looking at this old thread and wondered if a better solution existed which did not hog the CPU when the inkey$/timer etc was used. I somehow cant seem to be able to post directly to the thread.

Also another observation :- If a p4 CPU is used it will hog up 50% only while a Celeron CPU would be hogge'd to 100%. Why may this be?

One other question :- The solutions provided assumes that Windows XP(NT) is used, has anyone noticed CPU hogging with Win98.

Has PowerBasic released a fix etc ?

JustBASit www.compubyte.co.za


------------------

[Shawn Anderson]

Hello,

this is not a PB problem, it is a Windows problem.
win98 doesn't have the issue, but Win2k and later does.

this is the best solution that I've found, and explains what
is happening:
http://www.tamedos.com

------------------
If you go flying back through time and you see somebody else flying forward into the future, it's probably best to avoid eye contact.

[Mike Doty]

teratech had code to release a timeslice, but never used
with pb. the routine was called idle and worked with qb.
here is an example in pb/cc (which doesn't need it.)
not sure if pb has a routine to release a timeslice.

#compile exe
#dim all
declare function ink as string
declare sub idle

function pbmain  as long
  local keypress as string
  keypress = ink$
end function

function ink as string
  call idle
  ink = inkey$
end function

sub idle
  'release time slice code
end sub

this might be useful. see lance's code. http://www.powerbasic.com/support/pb...read.php?t=604
------------------


[this message has been edited by mike doty (edited august 25, 2005).]

[Matthias Hoffmann]

This is a SUB whis is part of one of my old input-output-libraries.
It was called during the keyboard-/mouse-polling-loop and contains some INTs
which are recommend then. But I never did intensive testing to proof those
calls to be helpfull in minimizing CPU load...

SUB wRelease() LOCAL PUBLIC
   CALL INTERRUPT &H28 ' INT 28 destroys registers, so use CALL
   ! MOV AX,&h1680
   ! INT &h2F
   IF BIT(PBVHOST,8) = 0 THEN ' only without Win 3.1+
      ! MOV AX,&h8400
      ! INT &h2A
   END IF
END SUB

I think there are some more INTs to release time slice and/or support multi-
tasking environments, take a look at Ralph Brown's Interrupt List.

------------------

[Marco Pontello]

Originally posted by A.Basit A.Bulbulia:
Also another observation :- If a p4 CPU is used it will hog up 50% only while a Celeron CPU would be hogge'd to 100%.

Probably with that P4 CPU you see the effect of HyperThreading (2 logical cores presented to the OS).

Bye!

------------------
Try Online TrID file identifier! Recognize over 1.700 filetypes and counting...
Give a powerfull scriptable Lua interface to your application with PowerBLua
PBTracer - Tracer / Profiler for PowerBASIC (soon!)