FR - Slim down the distro - optimize WSJT-X

[tubalainen]

Hi!
LOVE this initiative! Thanks for all your hard work guys!
I am using WSJT-X and it works. How ever the decoding is slow causing the decoding part to lag into the TX part, especially when there´s lot of signals active. The TX window becomes smaller as a consequence.

Would it be possible to slim down the armbian distro even more to optimize it even more to get more to gain performance of the applications?
Thanks a ton guys! <3
73s de SM4XDJ

[Links2004]

Hi,
what du you mean by slim down?

the decode is limited by the CPU, so the question becomes what is using CPU other the the APP and WSJT-X.
may us ssh or the terminal and htop to see the CPU usage by programm.

removing programs that are not running will not help ;)

Markus

[tubalainen]

Fully agree and I understand your point.
So you would say and consider the current distro (0.0.4) fully optimized to the point where´s there is nothing more to be done in terms of optimizing the performance?

We are currently running Xfce - dont know if we could decrease the CPU load by chancing to Xcde - probably not.

The UI app is hugging the majority of the CPU, I will give it a try to close it and see if WSJT-X will be more responsive.

[Links2004]

there are for sure little tweaks that can be done.
but Xfce does not need much resources to begin with.
for CPU load optimization it mostly comes down to what programs are running and what are the doing.

if you close the APP you will lose CAT and TX for sure, RX has a change to still work.

you can try to play with the nice level of the WSJT-X to allocate more CPU cycles to it.
and may disable the waterfall in WSJT-X since rendering it costs CPU too.

[tubalainen]

Ahhhhh - bummer. So the CAT thing is dependant on the x6100 UI app.

Lets hope for a new release of the FW where there´s been some optimizations done to the app - hopefully CPU load reductions.
By the looks of things the app is a quite "quick and dirty" hack hence its quite large and CPU intensive.

[tubalainen]

If we could cut the UI app CPU usage by half my estimations are that WSJT-X would work just fine - even with the water fall active.

[F4HWD]

Hi !
You can also replace WSJT-X by JTDX. I use it on a Raspberry Pi 3 and I can see a nice difference. JTDX is a bit faster thanks to multi-thread decoding, it uses all CPUs with efficiency.
But there is another problem : will the JTDX GUI fit on such a small screen ?