Wine/Crossover CPU spin

[danm]

Hi,
I'm running EA under Mac OSX - very nicely with either Wine or Crossover. The only issue is that the CPU spins, wine has two threads eating 30% when EA is doing nothing. If EA brings up a dialog box to open a file it goes quiet. I'm using the Linux EA version (same on either).

  Otherwise it seems to work great, but the idle spin is revving the fans on my laptop which makes it unpleasant to use. Is this a general problem that can be fixed?

Dan

[thomaskilian]

I'm using Parallels with no such problems. So I suspect it's to do with the emulation itself.

[danm]

Hi Thomas,
     Yes under parallels it works fine, except that parallels is crash prone somewhat, and is a memory hog. Wine is much more integrated, with the small problem that it spins.

Simon,
     Here's a wine discussion of the issue while running eMule - looks like the same thing.

     http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6936


     Here's a sample of it, seems to be an interaction with Xwindows. Another sampling program says it keeps calling GetTopWindow.

     Whenever there is a dialog box up it's not spinning. When it's the normal interactive mode it spins. With the exception of the Customize dialog - when that's up it spins!

     More information - when installing (Crossover on Mac Leopard) - when I try and install the Linux trial version it hangs right at the end of the first dialog which appears with the progress bar on uncompressing (Wise installer). Hangs dead there, even if I try and install multiple times. OK - go off and install the full version. That installs fine, but it doesn't ask me if I'm running Crossover. But it installs and runs great (except the spin) otherwise.

  Otherwise it seems to work flawlessly.

Total number in stack (recursive counted multiple, when >=5):
       511       _XGenerateGCList
       56       read$NOCANCEL$UNIX2003
       53       wine_server_call
       37       GetWindow
       35       write$NOCANCEL$UNIX2003
       26       __pthread_sigmask
       21       GetTopWindow
       10       GetFocus
       9       0xcdb925
       9       0xcde3eb
       9       0xcde42a
       9       SelectObject
       8       0xcde44c
       7       0xcde443
       7       RtlLeaveCriticalSection
       7       WINPROC_AllocProc
       7       WINPROC_wrapper
       7       WIN_GetPtr
       6       0xcde40f
       6       XFlush
       5       0xcde194
       5       0xd90fe9
       5       BITMAP_SetOwnerDC
       5       DefWindowProcW
       5       sigprocmask
Dan

[danm]

Well unfortunately there are some problems with Wine, namely the Tree view gets messed up. Since that's a rather important part working it rather makes it difficult.

[danm]

Hm - there's more to the story. Actually Crossover is working just fine, when the tree view isn't expanded it acts a little funny, but open things up and it's no problem.

The CPU spin thing seems to be a issue with Windows - apparently windows lies somewhat and spins quite bit. Parallels spins too - but it throttles the process more than Wine which lets them run.

So, crossover is still very useful. But it would be nice if it could be throttled a bit.

[thomaskilian]

I remember the time at Siemens some 20 years ago when we implemented a software throttle to offer multiple flavors of the same machine

[danm]

More information. I've run several other programs under Crossover and they don't spin at all. It seems to be something that EA is doing specifically.

I wonder if it's as simple as EA doesn't recognize that it's running under Crossover, since it's the new Mac Crossover? I never did get a dialog box asking if I'm running under Crossover.

[mrf]

Just a quick note to advise that we have made some improvements to EA's background processing behaviour and have made some significant steps to decreasing the processor usage while idle. These changes are still experimental, however we intend for them to appear in the next major release of Enterprise Architect (version 7.50).

Please be sure to consult the release notes of any new version of Enterprise Architect you install to see if the fix has been included.