| JonP |
 Posted 7/24/2001 11:34:05 AM
Electro runs really slowly on my EM500. Its far too slow to use in normal use. It takes about 20-30 seconds just to load the program. And it is extremely slow when accessing data and diagrams. Is this normal?
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Frank W. Zammetti
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 Posted 7/24/2001 9:08:52 PM
Electro does take a rather long time to start (15 seconds I think is about average on my E-125). That was a design decision because if I hadn\'t done it the way I did, then some screens would take a number of seconds to start (the schematic screen would take maybe 10 seconds to start EACH TIME you access it. I felt the initial startup delay was more acceptable than delays between tools).
While running though it shouldn\'t be too slow. The thought I have is this: how much memory do you have free on your device? I\'m thinking that since electro needs about 3 megs to run, perhaps your device is rather full and the operating system is doing a lot of swapping. Try freeing up some memory and let me know if that helps any...
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| JonP |
Posted 7/25/2001 9:03:14 AM
I\'ve got about 8MB free. I would think this is enough as it is difficult to free up much more than this on the EM500 (due to it only having 16MB built in). I would like to buy this software as it seems very useful but I would prefer if it was a lot faster so that I could use it \'on-the-fly\' whenever I need it. Do you have any plans to optomise the speed?
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Frank W. Zammetti
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Posted 7/25/2001 11:32:49 AM
I didn\'t have any plans to optimize it because this is the first reported speed problem I\'ve heard of. I know it runs very well on an E-125, even better on an iPaq and acceptably well on the Jornadas. I\'m wondering if there is something different about the EM-500 that I\'m not aware of. The only difference I knew about was the memory as you mentioned. As you said though, what you have free should be enough (I can only see a drop of about 1.5M when the program is running, I doubled that in the specs for safety).
I will certainly do some research and see what I can dig up. I don\'t own an EM-500 so I can\'t test it myself unfortunately. I\'ll see if I can find anyone else to try it out to see if it\'s a problem in general with that model or something specifically that your unit is experiencing.
In any case, I\'m not really sure what I can optimize anyway. If I optimize the startup time, then switching between tools would be slower, and vice-versa. The only real optimization, which won\'t be available until v2.0 at the earliest, is the ability to select what modules to install. That requires a pretty heafty level of change in the code and so that\'s not an immediate fix anyway.
I will look into this as much as possible and report my findings here. I\'m not sure how long it will take, as I said, this is the first time this issue has been reported to me...
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Frank W. Zammetti
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Posted 7/28/2001 2:53:59 PM
I wanted to let you know I haven\'t forgotten about you! Unfortunately, I haven\'t had any luck finding anyone with an EM-500 to test for me, so I haven\'t been able to make any progress.
I did look through the code looking for anything obvious. It all looks good as far as I can tell.
I\'ve so far been able to get a couple of people with iPaqs and E-125\'s to verify it works as expected. I haven\'t gotten any HP reports back yet, and as I said no EM-500.
I am still looking for someone else to help me out, until someone steps up there is little I can do. I am sorry I don\'t have anything better to report, but I wanted to let you know I\'m still working on it...
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| JonP |
Posted 8/15/2001 3:23:16 PM
Sorry for the lack of response. I\'m going to test the program I bit more now that I haven\'t used it for a while. I\'ll see if I can work out what\'s slowing it down or whether I\'m just impatient! :D
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| JonP |
Posted 8/15/2001 3:29:18 PM
I\'ve just had a flash of genius! I think the problem is the MMC card. As you probably know, MMC is much slower than CF and as I have an EM500, I install everything onto MMC. I think the MMC card speed is to blame for the loading times. Sounds right??
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| JonP |
Posted 8/15/2001 3:47:12 PM
I\'M BACK!! I ran it off the main memory and it was a BIG improvement. Sorry for the hassle caused (I blame casio!) I was suprised though that the loading time AND the speed between sections was improved when run from main memory.
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Frank W. Zammetti
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 Posted 8/18/2001 3:11:48 PM
Sorry I didn\'t reply sooner, I was away on vacation for a few days (finally!)
I\'m very glad to hear it was just the memory card. That didn\'t occur to me because (a) I have mine running from my card as well, but it\'s a CF card being as I have an E-125, and (b) That wouldn\'t have occurred to me because, as you said, it makes no sense that I can see that switching between screens is slower from the card. Certainly I can understand load time, but I didn\'t realize MMC was that much slower than CF.
I have to look into it a bit, but perhaps Windows CE runs programs in place, i.e., it doesn\'t load it from the memory card into main memory, it instead runs it directly on the card. That would make sense then at least, although I\'m still shocked that the MMC card seems to be so much slower than CF, I don\'t experience any speed problem switching between screens.
Well, I am very glad to hear you got it worked out, I hope you enjoy the program now. Take care!
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