ATW preview in PI 1.5

[Astrocava]

I'm playing with ATW and using the new real time preview  and I have suffered some problems.

The slider don't follow the mouse and sometimes remains without movement. Sometimes only is possible moving in small increments, sometimes jump too much...

Anybody else is experiencing this? Perhaps is my computer?

Sergio

[Juan Conejero]

Yes, I'm aware of this problem. It's difficult to fix so I decided to leave it unresolved for v1.5 

You can type numerical values directly, which works well since keyboard input isn't blocked too much by the Real-Time Preview interface. You can also use the mouse wheel.

The problem is that the Real-Time Preview is using all of your processor cores with real-time priority threads. Since multithreading is very efficient in version 1.5, the system has little resources to redraw the mouse cursor and keep track of mouse movement. One solution is to free one or two processor cores by limiting the maximum number of processors allowed, through Preferences. However unless you have a quad-core at least this isn't a practical solution, and even this may not work (depending on OS's thread scheduling policies).

I'll try to improve ATW's real-time interface response as soon as possible.

[Andres.Pozo]

I have a similar problem when applying a DBE with 900 sample points. The cursor (and the rest of the system) becomes unresponsive for a little while. When applying a DBE to 50+ images, the computer becomes unusable for minutes!! I don't know what are you doing with the multithreading support but PI1.5 is not a well behaved citizen in the system

[Intel Core 2 Duo 2.6GHz, 2GB RAM, XP32]

[Nocturnal]

I just tried a DBE with a few hundred samples on my dual core system and indeed the rest of the system becomes quite unusable. This means though that PI is working as fast as it can and that is good. I would not want a PI to leave 1 core available for other things until I had at least 8 cores available

Maybe there's a way to run one of the threads at a lower priority so it can be pre-empted by system processes a bit easier.

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Andrés,

PI1.5 is not a well behaved citizen in the system

This is precisely the idea 

You can limit the maximum priority of threads with the Preferences process. Select Edit > Global Preferences > Parallel Processing and Threads > Maximum module thread priority. Priority 7 is real-time priority, which all modules use now. You can set something like 5 or 4, and your system should be responsive during PI action. You can also limit the number of cores by unchecking the "Allow using all available processors" option.

If you are a command-line-oriented person, the parallel command is your friend. Enter:

Code: [Select]

help parallel
in PI's console for more information.