#264 High CPU usage in FreeDOS EDIT 0.9a

[Robert Riebisch]

Hi!

I noticed high CPU usage in EDIT. This is not new to freedos13. It seems to exist since 2008, because then was the last change to the EDIT package.
I tracked it down to the clock displayed in the status bar. This is constantly sending messages to the queue. But EDIT would only say "I'm idle", when the message queue becomes empty.

Completely removing the status bar by deleting the HASSTATUSBAR attribute in EDIT.C and rebuilding EDIT.EXE solved it.

But this can only be a workaround, because now you can't see status of INS mode, current line and row.

I would prefer just to disable the clock display separately.
(Or not to pollute the message queue for updating the clock display.)

Cheers,
Robert

[Jim Hall]

Copying some followup sent via email, so we can track it in the bug report:

I wrote: "I think maybe the best option is to remove the clock feature from the editor. I don't know that the clock adds much to the editor, anyway."

Robert wrote:

If a user doesn't care about heat generation or power consumption, it's
okay to leave in.

If you decide to remove the clock, a workaround for users relying on
that feature would be to use "File" -> "DOS Shell" -> date and/or
time commands. Maybe this could be added to the docs.

[Javier]

For the same reasons the statusbar also causes significant mouse cursor flickering.
It is particularly annoying on faster machines.
Removing the HASSTATUSBAR as per this report also fixes the mouse flickering.

The strange thing is that I can't reproduce the issue in the older edit 0.7d (i.e. the version available on https://github.com/FDOS/edit ) . Even with the status bar on (and the clock), it has no mouse flickering, and no significant CPU usage (even lower than 0.9a without the clock).

[Robert Riebisch]

https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/base/edit-freedos/-/issues/6