Performance Tests

2016-01-12

I have created a performance test today using Visual Studio 2015. I chose the CPU sampling, opened a file on EDF Browser, opened up the Power Spectrum, and set it to play real-time (Ctrl+Space) for 1.5 minutes. I had to use the Debug build (which is not advised) because I wanted to see the Qt methods in the result-graph.

The report show that EDF Browser never uses more than one core (max CPU is 25%), and the following methods are the most CPU-intense:

37.9% ViewCurve::paintEvent 16.3% SingalCurve::paintEvent 5.6% UI_SpectrumDockWindow::calculateFFT 3.3% UI_SpectrumDockWindow::compileSignalFromRawData

Conclusions:

• The waveform view (ViewCurve) draws too many lines and in an ineffective way. The typical user doesn't need to see all tiny waveform segments, so that should be optimized.
• FFT calculation speed is not an issue right now
• Multi-threading would be nice, but only one thread should draw the UI anyway, so until it's not significantly faster, we don't need it.
• UI drawing methods should limit framerate (to 50 fps?) to spare CPU power