Testing of software response time in various computing enviroments
2012
Plume, L., Latvia Univ. of Agriculture, Jelgava (Latvia) | Osadcuks, V., Latvia Univ. of Agriculture, Jelgava (Latvia) | Pecka, A., Latvia Univ. of Agriculture, Jelgava (Latvia)
The article describes a study about real-time performance of conventional PC by testing its response time to external events on a serial port in various conditions. For now PC’s are mainly used as the supervisory control and data acquisition units on the highest level of PLC system. The results of the study will clearly show the possibilities of addressing to a conventional PC more time-critical tasks e.g. controlling microclimate in industrial buildings, apartments or green-houses; controlling slow to moderately fast changing processes in bioreactors; temperature control for drying or material melting process etc. The goal of the tests is to determine the real-time performance of software running in runtime system environment on conventional home and office computing systems with common PC hardware and multi-tasking desktop operating systems. The study will be performed on PC using a variety of OS (Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows7 x32) and two types of runtime systems: Oracle Java Runtime and Microsoft .NET Common Language Runtime. Loading of the PC’s components by concurrent tasks also will be considered. Microcontroller unit (MCU) will be used to generate the signal to the serial port to which the PC should respond and also to accurately measure the computer’s response time, i.e. the MCU is used as a frame sender and computer as a forwarder. The time is measured between moment when the frame is sent out and received back to the MCU. The measured time is stored on the MCU. The computer software pools the serial port buffer to check if there is any data and once the frame is received the software immediately transmits the frame back to the sender. As a result the actual response time of the software running on the specified hardware depending on computer load and operating system features is determined. At the end of the study statistical analysis will be presented.
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