[hpsdr] Observations on the new HPSDR firmware/PowerSDR

[Dan Quigley]

I hope this helps.

 

On my WinXP box running on an Intel 2.1Ghz duo core with 3GB of ram,
PowerSDR works fine (read great!) for a "while" then the receive function
gradually starts degrading (drop outs/pops etc) until audio eventually
stops.  CPU also rises with the incidence of popping/drop outs.  How long it
takes to degrade appears to be related to audio buffer size and sample rate
settings.  The higher the sample rate the less amount of time it takes for
performance to degrade.   Transmitting also appears to accelerate the time
it takes to degrade.  

 

Good performance returns when you  restart PowerSDR (first waiting for the
previous instance to unload, which can take a while.

 

When running fine (e.g. no drop outs) , the thread that consumes most of the
CPU cycles in the PowerSDR.exe process has this call stack  (or one very
similar), at 192K bandwidth.

 

Thread 5-11% cpu

ntkrnlpa.exe!NtBuildNumber+0x43

ntkrnlpa.exe!MmIsDriverVerifying+0xbb0

ntkrnlpa.exe!MmIsDriverVerifying+0x1492

ntkrnlpa.exe!PoShutdownBugCheck+0x39e9

ntkrnlpa.exe!KeSynchronizeExecution+0x30c

ntdll.dll!KiFastSystemCallRet

KERNEL32.dll!WaitForMultipleObjects+0x18

pthreadVC.dll!pthread_exit+0x111

 

Once performance degrades and drop outs begin to occur frequently.  This
thread and call stack floats quickly to the top of the sorted by cpu list.
Then stays at the top.  This thread jumps to  50% cpu  when you close
PowerSDR and stays there for a minute or so.  When it eventually terminates,
PowerSDR is unloaded from memory:

 

Thread 34% cpu

Stack:

ntkrnlpa.exe!NtBuildNumber+0x43

ntkrnlpa.exe!MmIsDriverVerifying+0xbb0

hal.dll!HalClearSoftwareInterrupt+0x342

DttSP.dll!SetKeyerSampleRate+0x27c8

DttSP.dll!PolyPhaseFIRF+0x28ca

 

When the system has totally degraded this thread stays at 15% cpu 

Thread 15% cpu

Stack:

ntkrnlpa.exe!NtBuildNumber+0x43

ntkrnlpa.exe!MmIsDriverVerifying+0xbb0

ntkrnlpa.exe!MmIsDriverVerifying+0x1492

ntkrnlpa.exe!PoShutdownBugCheck+0x3702

ntkrnlpa.exe!KeSynchronizeExecution+0x30c

ntdll.dll!KiFastSystemCallRet

KERNEL32.dll!WaitForSingleObject+0x12

libusb0.dll!usb_set_debug+0x266

libusb0.dll!usb_reap_async+0xf

libusb0.dll!usb_bulk_write+0x1e

JanusAudio.dll!OzyBulkWrite+0x21

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openhpsdr.org/pipermail/hpsdr-openhpsdr.org/attachments/20090530/7340a575/attachment-0003.htm>