CPU usage: a cautionary tale

[RichardRussell]

I was trying to track down the cause of excessive CPU usage in one of my programs and eventually traced it to this code:

Code: Select all

      REPEAT
        OFF
        K% = INKEY(4)
      UNTIL K% <> -1

At first glance this looks entirely innocuous: it should spend nearly all its time in INKEY and use very little CPU. Indeed if you run the profiler that is exactly what it tells you, yet Task Manager was showing a CPU usage of around 50%! How is that possible?

It turns out that the culprit is that innocent-looking OFF. Because it's (quite unnecessarily) inside the loop it gets executed around 25 times a second, and OFF is equivalent to VDU 23,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0! So what it was actually doing was keeping the GUI thread awake pretty much continuously processing those VDU commands.

Moving the OFF outside the loop reduced the CPU usage to close to zero.

[michael]

Because it's (quite unnecessarily) inside the loop it gets executed around 25 times a second

Interesting.

[p_m21987]

This is interesting to think about.
I noticed the OFF being inside the loop right away. Over the years I've developed an instinctive/intuitive feeling for this kind of thing. I don't like to have unnecessary stuff inside my loops.

[Ivan]

It feels good when I can push an if statement outside a loop by rewriting code.