PC Stability

My graduation thesis was about designing a smart card reader / writer circuit and making necessary software development for it. I have tried to design a low cost reader, so I decided to use parallel port of PC instead of using a micro controller.

My advisor encouraged me to develop the software in Linux, that is the story of 'How I met your Linux'. My first experience on linux was on Mandrake Linux 8.

One day, I have wondered how stable was the PC, and decided to make a little test. I have wrote a small software in C and compiled with GCC to produce square wave with the highest frequency that PC can handle.

I have visualised the wave in oscilloscope. PC was able to produce square wave approximately at 200 kHz. Frequency was decreasing as the CPU was loaded, as I expected.

Then I wondered the result in Windows. Rebooted the PC with Windows 98, wrote an equivalent code in assembly and executed. I was expecting to have a little bit higher frequency because code was written in assembly.

Result  was surprising for me, it was impossible to lock to the signal to display it on oscilloscope. Frequency was so unsteady that it was impossible to see with auto trigger or manual trigger.

Then I have tried to close some windows and terminated some background processes such as anti-virus. Frequency become more stable but it was still difficult to catch complete cycles more than five seconds. Finally, screen saver disturbed all the frequency.

I have measured the frequency with a frequency counter and it was nearly same as in Linux version, maximum 200 kHz.

Today, we are developing most of the automation projects on Windows operating system, so I wanted to make a small test before sending this post.

I wrote the following code:

---

Private Declare Function GetTickCount Lib "kernel32" () As Long

Private Sub Form_Load()

    Dim i As Long

    Dim j As Long

    Dim StartTime As Long

    

    Dim StartCount As Long

    

    Open App.Path & "\Tick.csv" For Output As #1

        For i = 1 To 1000

        j = 0

        StartCount = GetTickCount

        Do While GetTickCount - StartCount < 20

            j = j + 1

            DoEvents

        Loop

        Print #1, j

    Next i

   

 Close

End Sub

---

Executed the code with and without DoEvents line. DoEvents function gives a breath to CPU for executing other processes.

Results are as follows, I have also calculated the histograms. The first one is with 'DoEvents':

And the histogram is:

And without 'DoEvents':

And histogram:

Adding 'DoEvents' decreases the execution speed but increases the stability. 

Graphics shows that you may not execute your code on time when you need it. 

Windows XP is more stable than I expected. However it seems that timing is still a problem if you don't use multimedia programming techniques for precise timing. 

In this test, you may realise one absence. I have intended to execute some amount of code in a certain time. But I have realised that time was not certain at all. I also intended to make one more test, I also have planned to measure the time to execute certain amount of code, however I have realised that GetTickCount functions resolution is not enough at all. I have realised that it returns multiple times of 16, not 1. I decied not to try to make the second experiment.

So I have suspections about the code above, I may have inaccurate measurements but it does not change the reality. PC is not stable enough if you are dealing with miliseconds. 

Perhaps, many people think the 'mean time between failures' when I talk about stability, blue screen of death (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Screen_of_Death) is another problem in PC based automation systems. I think the maximum up time of PC is the matter of sustainability, not stability.

Sustainability is another problem, I have searched a little about the GetTickCount function (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GetTickCount). It gives the uptime of computer in miliseconds. It can work up to 2^32 milliseconds=49.71 days.  I have never had a time to wait for, but possibly it will rise an 'overflow run time error' if not handled properly. This means that if you use GetTickCount function in your applications, you may need to restart your computer at most 49 days.  

In next post, I am going to tell about a power measurement system as a case study. Our customer was producing electrical devices which have a boot up sequence. During boot up, devices were driving their internal electrical components one by one in certain amounts of time, which makes it possible to test some components by measuring the power consumption.

Customer requested to manage all test parameters over a web page, and also wanted to see reports of test results in web pages,  making us to use PC. We were going to handle miliseconds with a PC.