What could go wrong?

[kf4hcw]

On 6/29/20 9:54 AM, Howard F. Cunningham wrote:
>
>  
>
> Today’s Windows rarely needs to be rebooted, if only Windows is
> running.  What you are running into is a program that is not playing
> nice and creating problems.
>
I beg to differ -- I am in the position to directly and indirectly
support many systems on many different platforms and of all of them
Windows is the most misbehaved. As for requiring the restart -- this is
my direct experience. If left to run for more than about 30 hours, clock
jitter creeps into the system and the scheduler no longer keeps pace
with the data up and down with the flex6300 -- this causes missed
samples which amount to wideband noise in the channel. The only
mitigation that has been successful is the reboot. (I tried everything
except for running dedicated hardware).

As for "Today's Windows" - For some things win 7 pro is still required
(due to driver and other support issues) and in any case Win10 is just
as nightmarish and unstable if not worse... again, direct experience,
not a myth.

I work with systems that almost never need to be restarted most of the
time -- all of the win* boxen I must manage frequently have these and
other issues when compared with my lin* boxen. It's not a myth, it's an
inescapable burden I fight every day.

It's my experience that most folks are so used to rebooting Windows on a
regular basis that they don't even notice they are doing it. As a result
they don't run into some of these issues simply because as a matter of
course they regularly reboot for all sorts of reasons (often enough not
even their choice).

Trying to support long-running timing critical software on Windows is
problematic and requires special care -- that's all I'm saying. I didn't
make it up.

>  A thought on the unlimited amount of data..  You could try running a
> scheduled task to delete the data.  Keep in mind that I do not know if
> this data is needed or what happens if the data is deleted while wispr
> is running.  If wispr needs that data while running, you could try
> using a scheduled task to shutdown wispr, delete the files, and
> restart wispr (assuming that wispr does not require any keyboard
> interaction to start)
>
I don't think it's required by wspr -- wspr is simply generating the
data as some kind of log... given the unmitigatable bloat of win* 40G of
disk space is not enough after a few days and wspr will generate enough
data to fill up the remaining space; but since I have to reboot it in
order to avoid the timing problems it's a) not a problem to delete the
data (there is indeed a menu option for it in the program) and b) a
scheduled task would not run reliably because of the necessary reboot.

It's not as terrible as it seems -- one should check in on these kinds
of systems periodically as a matter of course anyway; so handling the
required reboot and reset as part of that maintenance is easy enough to
fit in.

_M


-- 
kf4hcw
Pete McNeil
lifeatwarp9.com/kf4hcw

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.amrad.org/pipermail/tacos/attachments/20200629/1b9e48e0/attachment.html>