Lowering high CPU rates?

[Richard Gaskin]

David Coker wrote:
> Using a combination of visual feedback in the way of changing the
> cursor to "watch", a status area to display progress and selective use
> of wait statements, this little bugger is now as responsive and well
> mannered as anything that runs on the machine. CPU rate is down below
> 50% even for the largest data thrown at it. The sacrifice here is in
> the overall processing time, but it's still very acceptable now that
> other work can be done during processing.
> 
> Once I have had time to play with the routines and methods a little
> more, I'll try to put together a sample stack showing different ways
> to accomplish this. Might help the next guy running into similar
> difficulties. :)

Good work, David.

Do you use and progress bars?  If so, I've found them very 
cycle-consuming, and I tend to update them infrequently now when I'm 
working with large data sets.

So instead of doing something like this:

   put 0 into i
   repeat for each line tLine in tData
      add 1 to i
      set the thumbpos of scrollbar "progress" to i
      ...
   end repeat

Now I use the mod operator to reduce the number of times the progress 
bar is updated:

   put 0 into i
   repeat for each line tLine in tData
      add 1 to i
      if (i mod 100 = 0) then
        set the thumbpos of scrollbar "progress" to i
      end if
      ...
   end repeat


When I made that one change to WebMerge a while back, I got an overall 
50% performance boost.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
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