Sleep performance

[James]

So I'm just interested as to whether having a script which does the same as:

HotKeySet("{SPACE}", "ChangeSleep")

Dim $sleepTime = 500

While 1
    Sleep($sleepTime)
WEnd

Func ChangeSleep()
    If $sleepTime = 500 Then
        $sleepTime = 1000
    Else
        $sleepTime = 500
    EndIf
EndFunc

Would make much of a performance change? Is it worth changing the sleep to something a bit higher, if the script is just waiting?

-James

[Melba23]

JamesBrooks,

As I understand it, in setting the Sleep period to those levels you would merely render the script less responsive in GetMessage mode and have no effect at all in OnEvent mode.

If I run a script with nothing more than an infinite loop containing Sleep(10) - which is the lowest you can go with the normal Sleep command - I get a very occasional "01" appearing on the Task Manager CPU monitor. The same is true for any of my running scripts which have a loop (GUIGetMsg injects its own idle time of ~12ms in GetMessage mode). So I do not believe that increasing the Sleep period would gain you much, if any, performance gain for other running apps - and you would definitely lose out if you were running in GetMessage mode because of the (lack of) response to actions within the script itself.

M23

[James]

Well the script I'm concerned about doesn't have any OnEvent functions, so that's fine.

I'm just interested as to whether setting the scripts responsiveness to a higher level will help with performance.

Edit:

What I'm asking is; is there anything an application should be doing when it's just waiting for an event to occur (no GUI/Tray events)?

Edited January 9, 2010 by JamesBrooks

[Jon]

In GUIGetMsg mode the message loop automatically optimizes sleep so that when lots of events are firing it hardly sleeps and then when things quieten down it saves CPU and sleeps longer. Anything additional you do will more than likely make it worse

[James]

In GUIGetMsg mode the message loop automatically optimizes sleep so that when lots of events are firing it hardly sleeps and then when things quieten down it saves CPU and sleeps longer. Anything additional you do will more than likely make it worse

Awesome, that's just what I was wondering! Thanks for your reply Jon!