Request to make Gqrx less cpu and memory intensive

[Richard Didd]

Hi I have recently come back to Linux (mint 16 cinnamon) and have installed Gqrx again.

I have noticed that when in use my cpu is around 70% (expected high) but the most surprising fact is that the memory gets quite hot.
running htop shows lots of spawned tasks running from Gqrx.
In fact about 1.5Gb of ram is in use just for Gqrx, is this normal to have so much memory in use ?

I suspect this is related to parts of GNU Radio running in the background.

As a comparison, when I was in windows on the same pc I used SDR# software and the cpu was around the same but the memory use was around 500mb.

could Gqrx be made to run less intensive ?
Or does anyone have tips of how to use less memory and cpu  ?

I am running this on quite an old laptop (HP Pavillion Dv9100) but it has plenty of horse power to run this.
The laptop has an AMD Turion dual core cpu and 4gb of ram.

I will shortly be buying another laptop, but dont want to pay huge money for a laptop so what's the recommended specs for this program to run ?

thanks in advance
Richard

[Alexandru Csete]

On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 2:28 PM, Richard Didd <richar...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi I have recently come back to Linux (mint 16 cinnamon) and have installed
> Gqrx again.
>
> I have noticed that when in use my cpu is around 70% (expected high) but the
> most surprising fact is that the memory gets quite hot.
> running htop shows lots of spawned tasks running from Gqrx.
> In fact about 1.5Gb of ram is in use just for Gqrx, is this normal to have
> so much memory in use ?

It is not normal and I am quite sure that your measurement method is
incorrect. How do you reach the conclusion that gqrx requires 1.5 GB
of RAM?

Please understand that most user space applications will give some
sort of "virtual" memory usage which not representative of the actual
memory usage of a task. I'm sure the web is full of discussions on
this topic, see e.g. this explanation of how to interpret the columns
in top: http://serverfault.com/questions/238302/memory-usage-numbers-in-top-htop

I think the actual memory usage of gqrx is closer to 100 MB than 1 GB!

As for CPU usage - that topic has been discussed earlier and I refer
you to earlier discussions. Clearly, if I knew of an obvious way to
speed things up I would have done that and not wait for somebody to
come and request it as a feature. Seriously...

Other than that, I can only point out that top/htop can also be
misleading here. For example, on my machine htop says one of the gqrx
threads uses 70% CPU, yet none of my 4 cores goes above 25%. What's
the CPU load then? 25% or 70%?

Alex

[Richard Didd]

Alex

I think you have a good point there. I will double check.
am I correct in thinking htop is not the best tool to use then ?

Thanks for the prompt reply and keep up the good work.
Gqrx is very good software and now very easy to install compared to when i last used it (last year)

Rich

[Alexandru Csete]

On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 10:39 PM, Richard Didd <richar...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Alex
>
> I think you have a good point there. I will double check.
> am I correct in thinking htop is not the best tool to use then ?

The problem is that there is no obvious user-level method to tell how
much memory a program uses. On one hand one may claim that gqrx does
require 1.5 GB of memory, because it can not run without the shared
resources. On the other hand, most of those shared resource are also
required by other desktop applications.

You can try a tool like gnome-system-monitor and compare memory usage
before and after starting gqrx.

Alex