Firefly performance

[nurowolf]

Hi,

I recently bought my firefly and I love it. I have it working with Girder and the combination is fantastic - smart move teaming up with Girder.

I do have one issue - every now and then my Firefly seems to go off into never never land and stop performing. This freezes my whole PC until it recovers.

The x10 process is set to real-time so it hogs the whole PC when it is in its never never land.

When it finally recovers it plays catch up and processes all of the queued actions.

It mainly happend after I come out of standby - but it also happens when the PC has been on and not used for a while.

Has anybody else experienced this - and if so - what did you do to correct it?

[aaronmielke]

Did you set the X10 process to realtime? It shouldn't be that high because anything in Realtime has priority over the OS and that is generally a bad idea IMO. I would set it to High instead. Also, please get the update that is coming out in the next couple of days and let me know if it addresses your problem. We've made some changes to address the stalling issue and hopefully it will fix your problem as well.

[nurowolf]

Thanks for the reply.

I didn't set the priority to REAL_TIME. The installation did that.

I tried to change it to High, but the system told me I was Not Authorised (I am logged in as the Administrator). I am using XP Home so I was wondering if SYSTEM processes are locked off from my user account because of the XP version I am using.

I have tried changing priorities of other processes. Anything with SYSTEM I get a - you are not authorised message. Anything else I can change the priority.

I look forward to the update - by the way - will the update allow FireFly to 'Wake' the computer up????? That would be a cool new feature.

[aaronmielke]

I agree, wake up would be cool. Unfortunately, the hardware doesn't support that functionality at this time. As for your problem, I find it strange that your X10 process gets set to realtime, as I have never seen that before. In 1.2 I explicitly set it to high. Version 1.2 is now available, please let me know if it improves your situation. We are working on reducing the memory footprint of Firefly and keeping it resident in memory. If the current release doesn't fix your problem I am confident we can address it in the future.

[nurowolf]

Hi aaronmielke,

I updated to the new Firefly drivers like you said. Here is the strange thing. WHen I use firefly the drivers are loaded as Priority HIGH.

When I use GIRDER as my automation suite the X10mets.exe is loaded as REALTIME.

ANy ideas?

Thanks
Mark

[aaronmielke]

I'll look into that nurowolf

[nurowolf]

Hi Arron,

I spoke to the guys over wt Girder. They tell me that it is the FireFly plugin used in Girder that forces Girder and X10 to load in realtime.

So I did a little testing.

If I load Girder without the FireFly Plugin - it loads as HIGH.

If I use BMB and firefly (no girder) - the X10 stuff load in High.

Then when I disable BMB and re-enable Firefly plugin - guess what - X10 gets loaded into realtime. On the next reboot - so to does Girder.

So - quick question - was the FireFly girder plugin written by SNAPSTREAM or GIRDER people. If snapstream, could you take a look at a new release of this Plugin (I don't like anything being in real time).

If Girder wrote it - then back over to Ron to see what he can do.

By the way - I love my FireFly.

Regards
Nuro

[aaronmielke]

That's all Girder Nuro, and I'm glad you like Firefly. Let me know if you need any help dealing with the Girder folks as we have a relationship with them.

[artinfos]

"When it finally recovers it plays catch up and processes all of the queued actions."

- it seems my queued up actions are the left or right keys on the remote because it takes so long between actions to resort my recorded shows. It's a little maddening, actually. I sometimes have to wait up to 5 minutes before it finishes it's queued up "lefts and rights".

I'm surprised to see that this problem has such a dated history. Do we have an update on this. I'm using the latest BTV, no girder, x10 is set to high, 1.2.0.912 on firefly with BMB. Does the girder thing improve this or make it worse?

[bbroerman]

Are there new drivers for Firefly and BMB?

The issue I am having is:

1) When used with JUST BMB, the response in instantaneous.

2) When used with any other app (PowerDVD, WinAmp, WMP, SageTv) there is a 3 to 4 second lag between the button press and the action. When these apps are used with keyboard commands, they respond instantly to the keyboard commands...