Slow down when keypressed?

Randall R Schulz rrschulz@cris.com
Thu May 17 14:41:00 GMT 2001


Matthias,

Are you getting any error "dings" or "beeps" through your sound card (as 
opposed to the built in waveform generator and speaker)?

I've noticed that in some circumstances sampled audio output generated by 
console applications can introduce large delays and slow-downs either 
because of their intrinsic CPU requirements or because the execution thread 
that triggered the beep waits synchronously for the audio to complete, 
thereby interrupting its primary function (in this case displaying 
subsequent pages of the internal console scroll-back buffer).

In fact, overflowing the keyboard input buffer generates beeps, too, and 
that itself could create a steady stream of sound play requests as more 
unsavable keystrokes come in under keyboard auto-repeat.

Another thing to consider is how much the main CPU is called upon to scroll 
the screen and to paint characters. Perhaps your video card doesn't give 
the system CPU sufficient support and the paging itself (basically just 
erasing and painting characters as fast as possible).

Randall Schulz
Mountain View, CA USA


At 10:57 2001-05-01, Matthias Braun wrote:
>Hello,
>I looked in the faq and ml archives for that but I couldnt find anything.
>I'm running windows 98 and latest cygwin net release. The problem is when
>i hold a key down in cygwin, all console apps slow down dramatically, for
>example I hold the page down key in vi and I can watch the lines falling
>on my screen (cpu load about 99%), if I release the key, vi scrolls fast
>as ever...
>
>I think it's not a cygwin problem but a win98 one, because some other
>win32 console apps (especially the half-life dedicated server) show the
>same behaviour, thats not only on mine machine, but on all win98 machines
>I tried (friends, at school). I wonder if this problem really isn't known,
>or where is a solution for it.
>
>         Matze


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