Re: [pygame] New on the mailing list with a strange FPS behavior
Ghislain Leveque wrote: 2007/11/12, claxo [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On 11 Nov 2007 at 22:41, Ghislain Leveque wrote: Today I've come into a strange behavior with my rendering loop. 3. Memory garbage collection kicks in. you can try to do a explicit garbage collection after each M frames to see if max time is reduced. How do I do an explicite garbage collection ? Normal collection is run continuously (reference counting). The periodic part is just for cycle detection. Don't have reference loops. --Noah signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [pygame] New on the mailing list with a strange FPS behavior
Look at the module gc in the global module index of Python docs, but in a pinch: import gc ... gc.collect( ) Don't put into a tight loop, this waste cpu time. claxo On 12 Nov 2007 at 8:30, Ghislain Leveque wrote: 2007/11/12, claxo [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On 11 Nov 2007 at 22:41, Ghislain Leveque wrote: Today I've come into a strange behavior with my rendering loop. 3. Memory garbage collection kicks in. you can try to do a explicit garbage collection after each M frames to see if max time is reduced. How do I do an explicite garbage collection ? Thanks -- Ghislain Lévêque
Re: [pygame] New on the mailing list with a strange FPS behavior
I seems to remember time.time() is prefered to calculate delta times? Anybody ? On 12 Nov 2007 at 8:29, Ghislain Leveque wrote: First I will explain how I did measure and what make me think it's the draw that stucks : ... def post(self,event): for listener in self.listeners: now = pygame.time.get_ticks() listener.notify(event) self.stats[listener].append((pygame.time.get_ticks() - now,event)) Ghislain Lévêque
Re: [pygame] New on the mailing list with a strange FPS behavior
On Nov 12, 2007 4:29 PM, Ghislain Leveque [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And I can see the freezing. Put a time.sleep(0) call in your inner loop. The problem will likely go away. -- :: Simon Wittber :: http://www.linkedin.com/in/simonwittber :: phone: +61.4.0135.0685 :: jabber/msn: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[pygame] New on the mailing list with a strange FPS behavior
Hi there, I subscribed to the mailing list today because I've used pygame for a while now and I begin to be comfortable with it. Today I've come into a strange behavior with my rendering loop. I use dirty rectangles to update the screen so my render function looks like this : def draw(self): self.spritegroup1.clear(self.window,self.background) self.spritegroup2.clear(self.window,self.background) # ... dirty = self.spritegroup1.draw(self.window) + self.spritegroup2.draw(self.window) # ... pygame.display.update(dirty) self.clock.tick (TARGET_FPS) I've measured the time to each call to this draw function and the normal time is 15ms (quite fast) but from time to time, the function takes 500ms to execute !! And of course I see my game freezing... Can anyone tell me where I should look at ? -- Ghislain Lévêque
Re: [pygame] New on the mailing list with a strange FPS behavior
On 11 Nov 2007 at 22:41, Ghislain Leveque wrote: Hi there, I subscribed to the mailing list today because I've used pygame for a while now and I begin to be comfortable with it. Wellcome! Today I've come into a strange behavior with my rendering loop. I use dirty rectangles to update the screen so my render function looks like this : def draw(self): self.spritegroup1.clear(self.window,self.background) self.spritegroup2.clear(self.window,self.background) # ... dirty = self.spritegroup1.draw(self.window) + self.spritegroup2.draw(self.window) # ... pygame.display.update(dirty) self.clock.tick (TARGET_FPS) I've measured the time to each call to this draw function and the normal time is 15ms (quite fast) but from time to time, the function takes 500ms to execute !! And of course I see my game freezing... Can anyone tell me where I should look at ? -- Ghislain Lévêque 1. I don't known if clock.tick() can be to blame, maybe you can try to bypass clock.tick to see if times are irregular. 2. If the size or quantity of sprites have great variations, so can the time. And if the workload is too variable, probably clock.tick can magnify the diference. 3. Memory garbage collection kicks in. you can try to do a explicit garbage collection after each M frames to see if max time is reduced. 4. At each frame you can try to print some stats to see if there something unexpected, by example: print len(dirty), other info that you think is relevant, maybe the total dirty area claxo
Re: [pygame] New on the mailing list with a strange FPS behavior
On Nov 11, 2007 1:41 PM, Ghislain Leveque [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Today I've come into a strange behavior with my rendering loop. I've measured the time to each call to this draw function and the normal time is 15ms (quite fast) but from time to time, the function takes 500ms to execute !! And of course I see my game freezing... Are you 100% sure the problem is the rendering loop, and that it's not something else causing the problem? The reason I ask is you said your draw function usually takes 15ms... if your target fps is 60, then that means drawing is taking more than 90% of your 16.6ms per frame budget. If there was some other external element causing a delay by interrupting your program, it would interrupt your draw 90% of the time, and would make it look like it was the draw's fault. One way to test this is to time all the parts of your game and log them or draw them to a real time display or something. If you see the 500ms delay come in some other component, or you see your game freeze but draw didn't go to 500ms, then you know that you are getting a long delay that draw is not causing. if that's the case, it's probably another app (this can happen with an app that takes 100% cpu, which it sounds like yours does if draw takes 15ms) or some background thread or asynchronous process (I think streaming audio with pygame can do it, or garbage collection like claxo suggested). You can sometimes discover the offender with either a live file access monitoring tool (try filemon if on windows) or by a live cpu use monitor (just see if some other process jumps in every few seconds) If you are 100% sure it's in your draw... then you could maybe try putting in code to time each draw, and do something special if it goes long. You could try doing the draw again and time that to find out if it's due to what how you drew that particular frame or not. If a slow draw is repeatable, then you could run with a debugger and step through the bad draw. If it's not repeatable... well.. good luck to you...
Re: [pygame] New on the mailing list with a strange FPS behavior
Hi! This seems to sound like either an anti-virus program running in the background or something like SKYPE that takes up CPU time and will lock up the computer at an unpredictable time. I think all other programs running in the background should be turned off... Bruce - Original Message - From: claxo [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: pygame-users@seul.org Sent: Sunday, November 11, 2007 9:33 PM Subject: Re: [pygame] New on the mailing list with a strange FPS behavior On 11 Nov 2007 at 22:41, Ghislain Leveque wrote: Hi there, I subscribed to the mailing list today because I've used pygame for a while now and I begin to be comfortable with it. Wellcome! Today I've come into a strange behavior with my rendering loop. I use dirty rectangles to update the screen so my render function looks like this : def draw(self): self.spritegroup1.clear(self.window,self.background) self.spritegroup2.clear(self.window,self.background) # ... dirty = self.spritegroup1.draw(self.window) + self.spritegroup2.draw(self.window) # ... pygame.display.update(dirty) self.clock.tick (TARGET_FPS) I've measured the time to each call to this draw function and the normal time is 15ms (quite fast) but from time to time, the function takes 500ms to execute !! And of course I see my game freezing... Can anyone tell me where I should look at ? -- Ghislain Lévêque 1. I don't known if clock.tick() can be to blame, maybe you can try to bypass clock.tick to see if times are irregular. 2. If the size or quantity of sprites have great variations, so can the time. And if the workload is too variable, probably clock.tick can magnify the diference. 3. Memory garbage collection kicks in. you can try to do a explicit garbage collection after each M frames to see if max time is reduced. 4. At each frame you can try to print some stats to see if there something unexpected, by example: print len(dirty), other info that you think is relevant, maybe the total dirty area claxo
Re: [pygame] New on the mailing list with a strange FPS behavior
Hi all and thanks for your quick answers. First I will explain how I did measure and what make me think it's the draw that stucks : I use a custom MVC model and the main game object sends a cpu_tick event as quick as it can. I this cpu_tick loop, many things happen (objects move, towers fire, lose life, ) and the screen is drawn. In my controller object (the one which receives all the events and send them back to objects, I've a function like this that is called on every event received : def post(self,event): for listener in self.listeners: now = pygame.time.get_ticks() listener.notify(event) self.stats[listener].append((pygame.time.get_ticks() - now,event)) So, as you can see, I measure the time taken by each object to react to each event and the freeze is really created by the draw function. To be sure, I've added in my draw_function : def draw(self): now = pygame.time.get_ticks() # clear stuff # draw stuff self.stats.append(pygame.time.get_ticks() - now) And I can see the freezing. This morning, I tried my game on Windows (I'm developping on Linux) and, on Windows, the game is faster and don't freeze. So maybe RR4CLB is right and I just have another program using some of my CPU on the LInux box... I'll investigate more -- Ghislain Lévêque
Re: [pygame] New on the mailing list with a strange FPS behavior
2007/11/12, claxo [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On 11 Nov 2007 at 22:41, Ghislain Leveque wrote: Today I've come into a strange behavior with my rendering loop. 3. Memory garbage collection kicks in. you can try to do a explicit garbage collection after each M frames to see if max time is reduced. How do I do an explicite garbage collection ? Thanks -- Ghislain Lévêque
