Re: CPU getting hammered with xconq-7.5.0-0pre.0.20040519

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald@phy.cmich.edu>]

Hi Jon,

On Thu, 2004-05-20 at 21:48, Jon Leech wrote:
>     I've been trying out Eric's xconq-7.5.0-0pre.0.20040519 RPMs on
> Mandrake 10 (after some install bobbles involving, we suspect, a subtly
> broken or behavior-changed version of RPM that came with the distro -
> BTW, if anyone else is seeing weird checksum errors from rpm version 4.2
> on these RPMs, resigning the RPM with '--resign' seems to fix it).

Thanks for the reminder. I intended to put that tidbit on the Web site,
but didn't get around to it.

>     Initially xconq works well, although it seems in general somewhat
> more sluggish than 7.4.1 running on Mandrake 9.2. After a few
> minutes/turns of playing, however, the CPU usage on my machine starts
> getting hammered (top shows xconq consuming 98% of the CPU), and the
> game becomes effectively unplayable - response time on the order of half
> a second for each hex movement. This is invoking the standard scenario
> with a bunch of computer opponents e.g.
> 
>     xconq -L /usr/share/xconq -e 8,ai -M 78x76
> 
>     Saving the game and restarting improves matters briefly,
> but quickly returns to sucking up all the CPU.

I think Hans is probably more of an expert in this area than I am. I
have not yet gotten around to profiling Xconq and I think he has.

IIRC, the heavy CPU usage has been reported under Windows sometime in
the past 6 months or so.

>     An unrelated issue: it looks like at least some of the options in
> the 'View' menu aren't being saved. For example, if I start up a game,
> disable 'Unit names' and 'Feature names', enable 'Meridians', save, and
> restart with the saved game, those options are restored to their
> original state rather than the state I set.

I don't think that display settings get saved with individual games at
present; I would have to check the code to make certain.

If there are certain settings that you would like to see applied to all
games, then you can set them via the 'Preferences' dialog.

Eric