On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 9:07 AM, Richard Bell <richard.be...@gmail.com>
wrote:


> What I would like to do now, is learn how to monitor performance such that
> I can figure out which part of my receiver is the bottleneck, so I can
> focus on optimizations there. I can't lower the sample rate anymore,
> because I'm already at the minimum rate the USRP requires (320k).
>
> Would someone recommend a next course of action and tools I should
> download to proceed?
>

There are many potential sources of problems that can result in overflow
from the USRP. Some common ones:

- Insufficient network stack buffering in the OS. Increasing this, however,
may just be masking the real problem, and at the data rate you are
describing, is unlikely the issue.

- One of the blocks in the flowgraph is exceeding the CPU resources
available in a single core.  While all GNU Radio blocks run in their own
threads and area scheduled by the OS onto as many cores as are available,
due to their sequential data dependencies, a single "slow" block can become
the rate-setting portion of the flowgraph.  Normally, you always want the
hardware to have this role.

- OS operations like periodic file system flushing can often consume CPU
and I/O bandwidth that competes with the flowgraph.  This is made much
worse if you are writing to disk as a result of the flowgraph processing.

A coarse view of the flowgraph resource usage (CPU, etc.) can be had with a
thread and core aware tool like "htop".  This will quickly show if a single
block/thread has become a CPU bottleneck.

A more granular view can be seen with the "perf" tool available in the
linux-tools package. This allows profiling CPU usage by function and can
identify hot spots for further optimization.

Finally, it might help to understand if the overflow events are "a few
every so often", or continuous.

-- 
Johnathan Corgan
Corgan Labs - SDR Training and Development Services
Intro to SDR Classes - June 4-5, Columbia MD, June 29-30, El Segundo, CA
http://corganlabs.com
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