ncSender uses a lot of CPU power while idle

[kakariki1]

Pre-flight checklist

• I searched open and closed issues to make sure this problem hasn't been reported yet.
• I am willing to follow up with additional info or testing if needed.

Summary

ncSender uses a lot of CPU power while idle

Detailed description

Congratulation for this very nice project, exactly what I was looking for !
I tried it on 2 different machines and I can see a very annoying behavior.
The program utilizes one core for 100% while "doing nothing".

1. Core i7-8559U / 4x 2.70 GHz / 16 GB RAM / Windows 10
   On this machine it's still usable because it has lots of power.

2. AMD R-260H / 2x 2.1 GHz / 8 GB RAM / Windows 11
   Here it's practically not usable at all, it uses all available processing power and makes the machine VERY slow.

On both machines it seems it only shows this behavior when it's window is in the foreground.
In the background the CPU load is almost zero.

Are you interested in finding and fixing the problem ?
If you need more info, just tell me what to do ...

Best regards,
lakeroe

Steps to reproduce

Expected behavior

Actual behavior

Environment

Logs, screenshots, or screen recordings

No response

G-code program (optional)

No response

Impact

Minor inconvenience

Regression check

• Issue is new in this release (worked in a previous version)
• Issue occurs in multiple releases / unknown

[siganberg]

Will look on to it.

[siganberg]

Check if the latest release fixes it.

[kakariki1]

It's a bit better but still uses lot's of cpu power while idle !

For comparison:
Right now I'm using "Universal Gcode Sender", that's using exactly 0 % while idle ...

[siganberg]

Need exactly what causing it so I can fix it. Just got some time to install it on windows since I don't use windows anymore but can't seems to trigger the high CPU usage.

Will continue to monitor it.

[siganberg]

Also keep in mind, the visualizer of ncSender which uses three.js run more on the GPU. If you don't have good descent GPU, it might use CPU a lot which is not optimize for it. Most new intel processor has integrated GPU which is good enough even with N100.

[kakariki1]

I don't even have a file loaded, so there shouldn't be much work for the visualizer ...

[siganberg]

have you tried the v2? Is this still happening?

[kakariki1]

I just tried V2.0.22, and for me, this version does not work at all.
It still uses almost all available CPU power while idle and furthermore it does not even connect to the GRBL board via USB.
"Universal Gcode Sender" however works flawlessly ...

[siganberg]

connection to usb is fixed on the .24 for grblHal controller (not grbl).

Unfortunately, I can't reproduce the spike issue on idle on my system so I can't investigate and fix it.

[kakariki1]

Maybe you can make a special Debug-Version for me ...

[siganberg]

Im pretty sure that if there is problem it will be just the front end and not the server.

As an alternative you can run it on headless mode and just use Chrome and open http://localhost:8090 instead of Electron. Infact it has few advantage as you can make the Chrome run on full screen and use available space.

Guide for running headless:

https://github.com/siganberg/ncSender/wiki/Headless-Mode

If there is performance issue, there will some chrome process that will spike since the UI now is running purely on the chrome. You can also monitor the ncsender.server.

[kakariki1]

I just tried v2.0.25 in headless mode.
Chrome uses a few percent now and then, but far away from 100 ...

[siganberg]

thats good. Electron sometimes is problematic. I might replace it on the future but not my priority for now.