application slowing down

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I'm desperate and throwing myself on the mercy of this mail list.  I have an
irate customer who wants this problem solved quickly.  I have used MetaCard
to create software which we use to monitor and control our distributed
lighting control systems.  It does these things very well.  I currently have
a job which requires that I poll the status of all my controls every 30
seconds.  I do this so I can catch any changes of state and a close
approximation of the time at which that change occurred.  I also use this
function to catch any errors in operation.  The problem is that the time it
takes to poll all the controls becomes increasingly longer the longer I run
the software.  Initially it will take 33 seconds to poll all of my controls
if the polling interval is set to 30 seconds.  After three hours it will
take 43 seconds.  By the next day it will take 2 minutes.  If I poll at a
faster rate, the application will become slower at a faster rate.  I'm using
it on Win2k SP3 but the problem also occurs on Win98.  This problem occurs
even when I turn off all other functionality so that the only thing it does
is get the status of all the controls at each interval (no logging of
changes or errors, no triggering of timed events).  The problem does not
occur if I run the software without being connected to a system.  The
problem does not occur if I'm just connected to one of my controls which is
not changing state.  It appears that the retrieved information needs to be
changing at least occasionally.  I'll see some increase in memory usage as
this problem worsens but I'll still have a huge amount of free memory.  The
processor usage goes up significantly as the problem worsens.  It will start
at just a few percent (I'm monitoring this with the Performance tab of the
windows tack manager) Then continually increase as the problem worsens.  The
only way I've found to clear the problem is to shut the software down then
restart it.  I do not have to restart the computer.  I tried using Memturbo
to recover memory while my application was running but, no luck.  Is there
any way to get MetaCard to dump all the resources its using without shutting
down?  Does anyone have any other ideas?  I spent all last week on the
jobsite getting nowhere and could really use some suggestions.  Thanks.

Rich Mooney
Payne Sparkman Mfg.
shop at paynesparkman.com