E-mail: support
Date: 12 Jan 2005
Time: 09:07:19
From: Calvert Dayton
E-mail: support
Date: 12 Jan 2005
Time: 09:07:19
That's some good advice from Josh. I'd just like to add that in addition to CPU, you might want to keep an eye on memory usage while you're troublshooting with Task Manager -- particularly if you happen to notice a lot of disk activity. The fact that you're seeing the slow-down happen gradually over time also suggests the possibility of a massive "memory leak" in one of your programs.
A memory leak is what happens when a program doesn't properly clean up memory allocated for various tasks as it is no longer needed. So over a period of time, as it keeps allocating chunks of memory that it never releases back to the OS, it can eventually gobble up all your physical RAM and force the OS to use hard disk space as virtual RAM. This can really bring your entire system to it's knees and cause your hard disk access light to stay on almost continuously.
Also note that Smaart's FIFO averaging uses a lot of RAM in the normal course of things. I believe that if you use the max number of averages (128) with the max real-time FFT size (32k) the program will be looking for something in the neighborhood of 100 megs of RAM. So on systems that don't have a lot of RAM available, increasing the averages and/or FFT size can also drive Windows to disk for virtual memory, resulting in slow performance.