Idle program (FEMM) uses 100 of cpu core, can it be fixed?

[crobar]

Hi,

There is a finite element analysis prgram, FEMM, which I use which under certain circumstances eats the entirety of a CPU core when idle, but does not do the same when running on windows.

The problem occurs when FEMM is using a file based interprocess communication method, to interact with e.g. Octave (on windows it uses ActiveX by default). When using this method FEMM enters an idle loop in which sleep(1) is called on each iteration while it waits for a file to become available. On Windows this seems to be sufficient to not eat up CPU while waiting (0% reported), but on Linux results in high CPU usage (25-30% on a quad-core machine, according to 'top').

FEMM is free (as in no cost), and open source, available here:

http://www.femm.info/wiki/HomePage

you must start it with the command

femm.exe -filelink

to get the behaviour described above.

Is there anything that can be done about this on either the Wine side, or in the FEMM code to prevent this?

Thanks!

[dimesio]

You should probably ask this on the developer's mailing list. This is the user's forum.

[crobar]

ok, I'll do this, thanks.

[oiaohm]

http://www.femm.info/wiki/LinuxSupport crobar I guess you did not find this. How does it perform when its using Linux native OctaveFEMM. Yes FEMM is the GUI and OctaveFEMM does backend lifting.

There are a set of different things know to cause wineserver to go heavy on 1 core. Please do run a top command and see if it the application or if it wineserver eating the cpu.