Camunda's API: runtimeTime.setVariables() execution time is long, I found it by chance, usually about 2s, occasionally with 10s, anyone know why?
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I'd like to profile my (multi-threaded) application in terms of timing. Certain threads are supposed to be re-activated frequently, i.e. a thread executes its main job once every fixed time interval. In other words, there's a fixed time slice in which all the threads a getting re-activated.
More precisely, I expect certain threads to get activated every 2ms (since this is the cycle period). I made some simplified measurements which confirmed the 2ms to be indeed effective.
For the purpose of profiling my app more accurately it seemed suitable to use Momentics' tool "Application Profiler".
However when I do so, I fail to interpret the timing figures that I selected. I would be interested in the average as well in the min and max time it takes before a certain thread is re-activated. So far it seems, the idea is to be only able to monitor the times certain functions occupy. However, even that does not really seem to be the case. E.g. I've got 2 lines of code that are put literally next to each other:
if (var1 && var2 && var3) var5=1; takes 1ms (avg)
if (var4) var5=0; takes 5ms (avg)
What is that supposed to tell me?
Another thing confuses me - the parent thread "takes" up 33ms on avg, 2ms on max and 1ms on min. Aside the fact that the avg shouldn't be bigger than max (i.e. even more I expect avg to be not bigger than 2ms - since this is the cycle time), it's actually increasing the longer I run the the profiling tool. So, if I would run the tool for half an hour the 33ms would actually be something like 120s. So, it seems that avg is actually the total amount of time the thread occupies the CPU.
If that is the case, I would assume to be able to offset against the total time using the count figure which doesn't work either. Mostly due to the figure being almost never available - i.e. there is only as a separate list entry (for every parent thread) called which does not represent a specific process scope.
So, I read QNX community wiki about the "Application Profiler", incl. the manual about "New IDE Application Profiler Enhancements", as well as the official manual articles about how to use the profiler tool.. but I couldn't figure out how I would use the tool to serve my interest.
Bottom line: I'm pretty sure I'm misinterpreting and misusing the tool for what it was intended to be used. Thus my question - how would I interpret the numbers or use the tool's feedback properly to get my 2ms cycle time confirmed?
Additional information
CPU: single core
QNX SDP 6.5 / Momentics 4.7.0
Profiling Method: Sampling and Call Count Instrumentation
Profiling Scope: Single Application
I enabled "Build for Profiling (Sampling and Call Count Instrumentation)" in the Build Options1
The System Profiler should give you what you are looking for. It hooks into the micro kernel and lets you see the state of all threads on the system. I used it in a similar setup to find out what our system was getting unexpected time-outs. (The cause turned out to be Page Waits on critical threads.)
I want to write a small alert timer on windows using c++ and msvc2010. The timer needs to trigger a status message after a couple of minutes. I know how to check the system time using c++ and I know there is sleep function in windows api. How can I implement a timer with very little cpu load? For example, I don't want to check the system time every couple of milliseconds to trigger the status message when the trigger time is reached. Do I create cpu load, when using things like sleep(600000) in an extra thread or are there more efficient ways to wait a couple of minutes and execute some code afterwards?
You can indeed busy-wait and poll the time. Even a Sleep(1) will be enough that your program will be barely measurable.
I used to do it "back in the day" and even on my PII 233 Mhz running multiple threads doing this it barely made a dent in the CPU usage.
You could create a thread, write a continuous loop inside which you just sleep for the time interval that your trigger needs to run at then print your message. If you need to run it at 2 minutes, why choose multiple small sleep values and check the time? That would be a waste of CPU time.
I am profiling some AS code by measuring wall clock time. In order to minimize the error I need to run the code for a long period of time. However, flash seems to protect itself from unresponsive scripts by throwing an exception after some period of unresponsiveness, namely: Error #1502: A script has executed for longer than the default timeout period of 15 seconds.
Is there any way to disable this protection, or at least extend the timeout period?
If you are publishing with Adobe Flash CS/4/5 etc.
Goto the publish settings. select "flash" at the bottom of this screen there is a textbox which says "Script Timeout" I know you can increase this, I think the limit is 90seconds even though you can enter any value here.
Can you move execution of the script across separate frames, and add a timer to advance the frame before the timeout period has lapsed? I believe the error only occurs when you've dwelled on a frame for more than 15 seconds.
I have a file of data Dump, in with different timestamped data available, I get the time from timestamp and sleep my c thread for that time. But the problem is that The actual time difference is 10 second and the data which I receive at the receiving end is almost 14, 15 second delay. I am using window OS. Kindly guide me.
Sorry for my week English.
The sleep function will sleep for at least as long as the time you specify, but there is no guarantee that it won't sleep for longer.If you need an accurate interval, you will need to use some other mechanism.
If I understand well:
you have a thread that send data (through network ? what is the source of data ?)
you slow down sending rythm using sleep
the received data (at the other end of network) can be delayed much more (15 s instead of 10s)
If the above describe what you are doing, your design has several flaws:
sleep is very imprecise, it will wait at least n seconds, but it may be more (especially if your system is loaded by other running apps).
networks introduce a buffering delay, you have no guarantee that your data will be send immediately on the wire (usually it is not).
the trip itself introduce some delay (latency), if your protocol wait for ACK from the receiving end you should take that into account.
you should also consider time necessary to read/build/retrieve data to send and really send it over the wire. Depending of what you are doing it can be negligible or take several seconds...
If you give some more details it will be easier to diagnostic the source of the problem. sleep as you believe (it is indeed a really poor timer) or some other part of your system.
If your dump is large, I will bet that the additional time comes from reading data and sending it over the wire. You should mesure time consumed in the sending process (reading time before and after finishing sending).
If this is indeed the source of the additional time, you just have to remove that time from the next time to wait.
Example: Sending the previous block of data took 4s, the next block is 10s later, but as you allready consumed 4s, you just wait for 6s.
sleep is still a quite imprecise timer and obviously the above mechanism won't work if sending time is larger than delay between sendings, but you get the idea.
Correction sleep is not so bad in windows environment as it is in unixes. Accuracy of windows sleep is millisecond, accuracy of unix sleep is second. If you do not need high precision timing (and if network is involved high precision timing is out of reach anyway) sleep should be ok.
Any modern multitask OS's scheduler will not guarantee any exact timings to any user apps.
You can try to assign 'realtime' priority to your app some way, from a windows task manager for instance. And see if it helps.
Another solution is to implement a 'controlled' sleep, i.e. sleep a series of 500ms, checking current timestamp between them. so, if your all will sleep a 1s instead of 500ms at some step - you will notice it and not do additional sleep(500ms).
Try out a Multimedia Timer. It is about as accurate as you can get on a Windows system. There is a good article on CodeProject about them.
Sleep function can take longer than requested, but never less. Use winapi timer functions to get one function called-back in a interval from now.
You could also use the windows task scheduler, but that's going outside programmatic standalone options.
I was just trying the SetTimer method in Win32 with some low values such as 10ms as the timeout period. I calculated the time it took to get 500 timer events and expected it to be around 5 seconds. Surprisingly I found that it is taking about 7.5 seconds to get these many events which means that it is timing out at about 16ms. Is there any limitation on the value we can set for the timeout period ( I couldn't find anything on the MSDN ) ? Also, does the other processes running in my system affect these timer messages?
OnTimer is based on WM_TIMER message, which is a low message priority, meaning it will be send only when there's no other message waiting.
Also MSDN explain that you can not set an interval less than USER_TIMER_MINIMUM, which is 10.
Regardless of that the scheduler will honor the time quantum.
Windows is not a real-time OS and can't handle that kind of precision (10 ms intervals). Having said that, there are multiple kinds of timers and some have better precision than others.
You can alter the granularity of the system timer down to 1ms - this is intended for MIDI work.
Basically, my experiences on w2k are that any requested wait period under 13ms returns a wait which oscillates randomly between two values, 0ms and 13ms. Timers longer than that are generally very accurate. Your 500 timer events - some were 0ms, some were 13ms (assuming 13ms is still correct). You ended up with a time shortfall.
As stated - windows is not a realtime OS. Asking it to do anything and expecting it at a specific time later is a fools errand. Setting a timer asks windows nicely to fire the WM_TIMER event as soon after the time has passed as is possible. This may be after other threads are dealt with and done. Therefore the actual time to see the WM_TIMER event can't be realistically predicted - All you know is it's >the time you set....
Checkout this article on windows time