After Jerry Pixton explained that XP will permit several sound card
applications to run simultaneously, I started thinking that it might be
useful sometimes to have multiple instances of a soundcard TU like MMTTY
running in order to copy the signal under several different "profiles"
simultaneously. Sometimes when signals are marginal in a contest I have to
mentally combine outputs from several different "receive only" TUs to
extract the exchange data.
So, the obvious question: How many instances of MMTTY can a modern computer
run?
It was easy to set up a test: On my 1.5 GHz P4 512 GB machine running XP
Professional SP2, I started up 6 instances of MMTTY. I set up each
differently - several profiles, two printing reverse copy, two with a
notch, one with BPF on.
I wondered how well my new cheapie AMD Sempron 3000+ (2 GHz) 256MB XP Home
machine would compare, so started up the same test on it.
XP's "Process Monitor" utility reported average processor usage. I removed
one copy and waited 2 minutes for each step.
All MMTTYs appeared to run well, each printing its independent best guess
of the signal. Live RTTY signals were present only part of the time.
The performance monitor readings are:
%Processor time Copies of MMTTY
Pentium 4 Sempron
34 12 6
25 10 5
23 08 4
12 06 3
10 04 2
05 02 1
00 00 0
If you smooth out the steps, it looks like the P4 takes 5% for each copy
whereas the Sempron takes 2%.
Writelog was not running at the time, but I wouldn't expect it to add much
load. Looks like modern computers can do MUCH more than we usually ask of them.
Please forward this to the MMTTY reflector (one copy). I don't subscribe to it.
Jerry W4UK
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