Nick Allen described a problem where loading tracks into Viking slows
his computer down to the point of unusability, usually temporarily. I
experience similar problems. Greg Troxel responded. My comments
follow.
Greg:
> But, what I do is
>
> viking gpx.viking track.gpx waypoint.gpx
It's not clear to me from the documentation what's going on
here. You're loading three files, yes? I assume one of them
(track.gpx?) is from the GPSr; where are you getting the others?
Greg:
> and start each time. I don't try to have a huge viking file with
> all of my tracks.
Is this a bad thing to do? I have a Viking file for exactly that
purpose! And even my files for specific areas get pretty large after
years of hiking and geocaching.
I don't know a lot about XML; are you saying XML doesn't scale well?
I would love to find a utility, perhaps a simple set of shell scripts,
that would:
1. Parse a Viking XML file and generate SQL to insert all the tracks
and waypoints into a relational database like PostgreSQL or mysql,
preferably using simple-enough SQL that I get to choose which DBMS
to use.
2. Convert the results of a database query into Viking-readable XML
so that I can load it and display and manipulate its contents.
Then I could use the full power of a relational DBMS to find tracks
and waypoints by name, by date, by location, etc, and load only those
into Viking so it's not burdened by a huge file of data I'm not using
at the moment.
Does anything like that exist, somewhere?
Nick:
> > & everything freezes for several seconds, but always recovers. If
> > there are several tracks with many waypoints the programme may
> > become
Greg:
> When it is slow, does top/etc. show that viking or X is using all
> the cpu time, or something else, or ?
Viking is usually high in the list, but X is the one with huge CPU.
Sometimes, oddly, kmail (I use Kubuntu) has a high CPU hit as well.
Killing kmail doesn't give me back the machine. I still have to wait
it out or, like Nick, power-cycle.
My workaround is to have a small file just for loading the tracks from
the GPSr, selecting the ones I want, renaming them, and only then
loading the big file of all my tracks and copying them over. That
mostly avoids the slowups, except when I zoom several increments at a
time. That can bring my machine to its knees.
I'm also noticing that Viking crashes often, but that could be a
problem limited to the version I'm running (not the latest).
Like Nick, I've learned to save my files very frequently.
Greg:
> In theory viking cannot cause this.
Why not, in theory?
> In practice I bet there is a kernel or X bug that is being triggered
> by viking. Does your computer have problems with anything else? It
> almost sounds like it could be a weak power supply.
I'm adding my comments just to establish that Nick isn't the only one
seeing these problems.
My details: Kubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal on a Lenovo T41 Thinkpad,
Intel Pentium M 1.86GHz, 2GB memory. Viking 0.9.94.
Yeah, I need to get around to upgrading to the newer Ubuntu which
finally has a Viking version that begins with 1! But I've noticed
these slowdown problems over many Ubuntu and Viking versions, and it
sounds like they're still there, even if limited to a few lucky users
like me and Nick!
Greg:
> Thanks for speaking up - I would say that while there's a
> non-viking bug, it seems pretty clear that viking uses more
> resources than people would like.
It's of course possible that Nick and I have the same non-Viking bug
which only appears when we run Viking, but perhaps it may be a Viking
bug after all. It's not clear from Nick's post but perhaps he, too,
has a big file of tracks. BTW it doesn't need to be that big for these
problems to manifest.
Thanks to all the Viking developers for this great tool that I'd hate
to live without.
Ted
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