RISC OS Pyromaniac ticker registrations and statistics

by gerph 2 years ago

macOS ◆ xterm-256color ◆ fish 573 views

RISC OS ticker registrations have never really been exposed to callers. There’s been neither an official interface to read them, nor an unofficial tool that did so. During debugging of some modules I noticed that the ticker events were being called a lot more often than I had expected, in the traces I was following. So to make it easier to see what had been registered at a given time, I added a new *-command to list the currently queued ticker events. This makes it easy to see some of what the system has in use.

The list of ticker registrations shows the Classic RISC OS registrations with their call address and workspace, and the internal Python registration. In each case, the time to the next tick, and the period (if any) is shown.

Seeing that these reports were useful, I added some statistics gathering, so that it was easier to see how many events have been triggered. The statistics can be displayed through a *-command, but once they are enabled the statistics will be displayed as the system exits.

The statistcs show values for the current second, a 15 second period, a minute, and then longr periods. The current accumulator and previous period’s accumulator values are shown. The ticker system counts the number of dispatches performed (how many times code was actually called), the number of triggers performed (how many times the tickers are checked for expiry, the maximum number of items that were registered at trigger time, and the number of registrations of each type of ticker.

This recording shows how the Freeway and ShareFS modules register tickers.

More by gerph

RISC OS Pyromaniac ANSIText VDU implementation 00:34

by gerph 2 years ago

Programs used with RISC OS Pyromaniac to display on the LCD 00:19

by gerph 2 years ago

RISC OS Pyromaniac ticker registrations 00:27

by gerph 2 years ago

Disassembling RISC OS ARM code on other systems 00:55

by gerph 6 days ago

See all

You can download this recording in asciicast v2 format, as a .cast file.

Download

Replay in terminal

You can replay the downloaded recording in your terminal using the asciinema play command:

asciinema play 489165.cast

If you don't have asciinema CLI installed then see installation instructions.

Use with stand-alone player on your website

Download asciinema player from the releases page (you only need .js and .css file), then use it like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="asciinema-player.css" />
</head>
<body>
  <div id="player"></div>
  <script src="asciinema-player.min.js"></script>
  <script>
    AsciinemaPlayer.create(
      '/assets/489165.cast',
      document.getElementById('player'),
      { cols: 101, rows: 33 }
    );
  </script>
</body>
</html>

See asciinema player quick-start guide for full usage instructions.

While this site doesn't offer GIF conversion at the moment, you can still do it yourself with the help of asciinema GIF generator utility - agg.

Once you have it installed run the following command to create GIF file:

agg https://asciinema.org/a/489165 489165.gif

Or, if you already downloaded the recording file:

agg 489165.cast 489165.gif

Check agg --help for all available options. You can change font family and size, select color theme, adjust speed and more.

See agg manual for full usage instructions.