Minimum system performance? or am I crazy?

[Toaster]

Surely I'm doing something wrong. The pc I'm running vixen on is a AMD XP1500+ with 512mb PC133 ram. Its an old MSI board I had laying around, with a GF mx200 agp video card. All running Windows XP.... I feel like the PC is barely capable of running Vixen... Its like I can catch the sequence missing a beat, skipping a light on or blink... and maybe sometimes being off key be a few milisecs....

Whats the minimum for a dedicated vixen pc? Is that machine not more than enough?

[Macrosill]

http://www.doityourselfchristmas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1294

[biffklg]

I do my programming on an AMD Athlon 4.6GHZ with 1G ram and 512MB video card. If I do a sequence at 25ms and a lot of blinky flashy going on I still see missing blinks and flashes on the preview plugin but it works perfectly through the olsen 595's on the show computer.

I have been told that the bigger the preview picture is, the harder it is for the computer to show everything so fast. It has to redraw that picture with all the "lights" so many times a second it just can't keep up.

I don't run the preview on the show computer just on my programming one so I can kinda see what its gonna look like. I think I am going to use a smaller picture next time.

[daviddth]

Whats the minimum for a dedicated vixen pc? Is that machine not more than enough?

That SHOULD be enough, but I'd suggest a few things.

1. Turn off the preview during the show. You have the lights flashing outside, so you dont really need them on the screen

2. Turn off the virus scanning & other background tasks on the PC. I leave mine running a virus scanner as its still connected to the network, so I would like it protected :)

3. Just run vixen and no other programs.

4. If you can, run the show as a sequence rather than looping the one song. That way the screen is not updated as the music scrolls along.

5. Um, I cant think of a number 5.... Maybe limit your sequnces to 50 msec slots - that way it should not push the parallel transfer too much. I found that my laptop struggled at 25msec badly, but at 50 I do pick the occasional glitch, but 99.99% of the visitors (and I'm getting 50+ cars a night this year) dont pick anything at all

[Mudsculpter]

Go to this site and apply the <<safe>> configuration for registry tweaks to disable services. I do caution you, these tweaks involve making registry changes so only do these if you feel comfortable. I made these changes on my show machine only.

http://www.blackviper.com/

[fcky529]

is this a "fresh" install of XP, if not, there's most likely alot of stuff built up in temp files and little background tasks. try a fresh install of XP or go through and delete everything that's not needed and try running this program ccleaner as well, in my opinion "virus/spyware scanners" are a waste most of the time.

http://ccleaner.com/

If that doesn't work, then reformat or add more RAM as PC133 is quite slow by todays standards so moving up to a GB would be wise and being older stuff should be cheap. here's a link to gateways memory, they are one of the cheaper sources for memory.

http://www.gateway.com/accessories/category/316634.php?seg=hm

[Toaster]

The pc that is dedicated to running vixen and controlling the lights is a MSI something or another board, running 512mb PC133 ram, AMD XP1500+ cpu with onboard sound.

I'm sure turning the preview off will help..... (COUGH) how exactly do I do that? (COUGH) :(

[mac_man_luke]

im running my vixen off a 600mhz p3, no problems so far (only 16ch this year)

[daviddth]

Just go to the attached plugins and untick the Adjustable Preview. I also found that during showtime creating a program that contains all your sequence(s) and having it turn on & off at your selected time also reduced load on my PC by a few %.

OK some testing has shown some interesting results. PC is a Toshiba A70 Laptop, 1GB ram, 120GB HDD, 3.06Ghz Pentium 4 processor,

Running a sequence with the adjustable preview on (Vixen 1.1.11) has my show PC topping 22% CPU usage, and sitting about 11-15% most of the time.

Same sequence with the adjustable preview not running, a whopping 5% CPU peak when the page scrolled across to the next one, and 2% for the rest of the time

Same sequence running on a timer - CPU never got above 2%, but normally sat on 1%. When it loaded the next sequence it peaked at 18%. I think I know why it did a high peak here as this was the first time the sequence was run through, as the next time the peak was 4%, so maybe the first time it loaded the sequence into memory?

Anyway, by simply turning off the adjustable preview here I dropped the CPU load by up to 3/4

Edit: Just tried it on Vixen 2.0 and the CPU loads are very similar.

[Toaster]

I have a "show" scheduled to run from 5:30 to 12am. It contains all my sequences, and set to loop. I checked the plugins and untick'ed the preview... So far so good.

I'm not 100% sure what you're saying about a sequence running on a timer? I'm assuming thats having the 6 sequence show scheduled? or are you saying to schedule each individual sequence separately?

[tfmacz]

The preview takes a bunch of "horsepower" to run.

My display computer is a 266meg P2 laptop running a fresh xppro-sp2 install.

I am running 128 channel 100ms sequences on grinch hardware with no visible "ticks"

[daviddth]

yes I meant scheduled to run in a loop - 5 individual sequences one after the other. On at 8 off an midnight. Because it shows nothing on the screen, not even the scrolling screen as when you normally play an individual sequence using the play button, the CPU load is close to zero as I can reliably get.

[Sean Bowf]

Running a 64 channel Olsen off an AMD slot 1 750 MHZ machine without a problem. Sounds like you got plenty of power...something much be hogging it up...

Sean