Ok I been just doing some experimenting with different hardware to run Lightburn. One of the thoughts I had was to try it on an atomicPI running windows 10. The thought is I could use a dedicated $35 dollar board install directly into my K40. Then I could use remote desktop to configure and then run out to the shop to position and start it off a small 7inch touch screen.
Well to be honest it works great to start off with the performance deteriorates over time. You can spend hours in the lightburn software with no issue super responsive and works perfectly. Once you start a job the performance deteriorates to where you cannot even open another window. The only fix it to restart the machine. Now here is the strange part. Total CPU used 11% and 32% Memory for the entire system.
This slow down does not appear to be a resource issue from what I can tell from the task manager and no errors of consequence in the event viewer. My only thought is something with the GPU from how it seems to have a hard time rendering after about 30 minutes into a job.
Specs
Processor Intel Atom x5-Z8350 CPU @ 1.44Ghz
RAM 2GB
Windows 10 Pro… Stripped down to bare necessities.
Thoughts? I may try putting linux on it and seeing if that works any better but was really hoping to use RDP as it is much better for jobs like this.
LightBurn changes the system time slice duration when jobs are streaming to the controller, to prevent the controller from stuttering, and the GCode sender is running on its own thread (though it doesn’t really do a ton of work, and should spend the bulk of its time asleep).
The PI is not a high performance system, particularly when trying to run a full screen UI. It’s one among many reasons we don’t support them. If you mean Remote Desktop Protocol, you’ll be adding capture, compression, and transmission of the interface to all the other work it’s already doing. You’d be better off just getting a crappy used desktop PC for a hundred bucks - it’s still likely going to outperform the PI.
Having said that, older versions of LightBurn did not have the time-slice change, so you could try 0.9.16 and see if that behaves any better. It’s going to affect the streaming performance to the controller though.
I do understand the limitations of the hardware as I said it’s just an experiment to see if a cheap intel atom board would handle it.
What I am missing is I get the lag when it is sending gcode but why does it continue after the job completes. Should it not return to normal or does the thread continue with time slicing after it completes?
The way it is reacting just seems strange. Works great until about 10 minutes into the job and starts slowing down. The cpu and ram usage are low. Killing the lightburn process does not recover the system only a reboot will solve it. Unless the gcode send process is not dying when killing the root process.
For how responsive everything is even into the job it looks like it would work fine.At some point into the job something goes rouge and it starts to progressively get worse. I ran 20 5 min jobs no issues. Ran a hour job and died completely 45 minutes into it and windows could not recover.
The only other thought is could it be something with windows itself? It is a extremely trimmed up version to work on the board.
Any troubleshooting suggestions to locate the root cause?
The GCode sender is a thread, so killing the app will kill that too. If a reboot is the only thing that makes it run smoothly again, it’s unlikely LightBurn, and more likely system level. Possibly memory or page fragmentation - over time, if the system is light on resources, you might be swapping / paging to disk more and more.
Running the task manager and looking at the memory page might give some clues. From there you could also try the Resource Monitor tool and see if you’re getting a lot of page faults (those are cache misses, requiring page loads from disk).
Thanks for the suggestion! That gave me the idea of checking page file. I turned off page file and it’s been working alsome so far. I have been sending jobs to it all day and the preformance has been as good as any laptop. Think I might keep it running this way. It eliminates the need for a bulky machine for a $35 board. I will keep testing and if it keeps running good I will update and write something up for anyone interested. So far the atomicPi maybe the solution I stick with. I will update in a few weeks if it keeps working like this. Might try to add a camera too and see if it can still keep up.