XTA UI / Analyze Timing in xTimeComposer Studio Constantly Hanging Topic is solved

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aneves
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XTA UI / Analyze Timing in xTimeComposer Studio Constantly Hanging

Post by aneves »

Hi Everyone,

I have a rather annoying issue I keep running into. Whenever I load up my built binary into the timing analyzer in xTimeComposer, I'm met with several and very long UI hangs. I'm using version 14.2.4 and reproduced the same problem in 14.3.2 in Windows 7 64-bit. To be clear, when I say the UI hangs, I mean that none of the menus or other UI elements are responsive, my cursor turns into the spinning blue wheel, and the entire window becomes frosted where the title bar becomes appended with the text "(Not Responding)". Each hang lasts at least 60 seconds and I have experienced hangs lasted well over 5 minutes.

Here are the steps I follow which lead to the first GUI hang.
  1. After launching xTimeComposer into my workspace, I switch to the Analyze perspective by clicking the "Analyze" button on the left sidebar.
  2. I click on the folder icon in the menu bar that reads "Load binary into XTA".
  3. I select the .xe file I want to analyze.
  4. I click on the green "F" button's drop-down to select the function I want to analyze.
  5. First hang of about 2 minutes occurs.
  6. Navigate to Routes list, click on any child element of the route such as an instruction line, block line, conditional line, function line, etc.
  7. Next hang of about 5 minutes occur.
This makes the timing analyzer unusable. I've seen the same behavior on a colleague's machine too. Has anyone else experience this problem?

After poking around I can see that it is related to xTimeComposer thrashing my hard drive. When I follow the above steps with Process Monitor running and/or Windows Performance Recorder running, the results show me that xTimeComposer is repeatedly searching through my source code paths over and over and over again nonsensically. As a test I installed xTimeComposer on a clean machine and copied only my binary .xe file over to it. When I launched xTimeComposer, I chose an empty workspace so it did not have access to my source code paths. When I load the binary into the timing analyzer and follow the same steps I outlined above, the timing analyzer works fine! No hangs whatsoever.

If I copy over my entire workspace hierarchy and reload the binary out of the original "bin" path BUT still keep the IDE in the empty workspace, everything still works fine. It's only when I load my binary after switching to the actual workspace AND importing my existing projects where I can recreate the hangs on the new machine. If I delete everything out of the workspace, the timing analyzer works fine again.

Can anyone help me resolve this? I have a critical need to use the timing analyzer but these hangs prevent me from doing so.

Thanks!


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peter
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Post by peter »

I have seen similar behaviour in that when the binary is loaded as part of a workspace then the XTA tool is trying to annotate the source files associated with any path that is selected.

We will need to investigate as to why this is so inefficient. Unfortunately, in the meantime the best thing will be to work on a binary that is not connected to the workspace, or to perform the analysis from the command-line.
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aneves
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Joined: Wed Sep 16, 2015 2:38 pm

Post by aneves »

Thanks for replying!

Can we expect some kind of improvement in some reasonable time frame?

I feel like this isn't on XMOS's radar. I didn't see it in the list of known issues in the xTimeComposer release notes. Quite a shame for a potentially very useful tool that is heavily marketed on the xmos site and on XMOS's YouTube channel.
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aneves
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Joined: Wed Sep 16, 2015 2:38 pm

Post by aneves »

Could anyone from xmos comment on my previous post?

Thanks!
Gothmag
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Post by Gothmag »

I'm not with xmos but I think you're safe to assume that since there is a workaround, even if it isn't convenient, it will not change any time soon. This has been an issue for years.
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