Voice Power voicemgr a CPU pig?

[Bill Mayhew]

I recently installed a voice power board in my Unix PC (thanks
Lenny & Tom).  It looks like the vda script processor is sufficient
for the project that I want to write, but I was curious to check
out the voice manager driver (voicemgr).  I installed the Voice
Power board in the middle slot of my 3b1, which has no other add-in
boards.  I picked the middle slot because the RJ-41 jumper I had on
hand was only long enough to reach from the middle slot to the OBM
phone output jack.

I presume that the voicemgr defaults to using the floating card ID
for monitoring events from the voice card(s).  What I noticed is
that a number of things really slowed down with the voicemgr
running eventhough there were no voice events happening at the
moment.  For instance, HDB uucp would only get 622 char/sec
thoughput receiving /etc/termcap from another sytem, whereas the
normal rate is about 1120.  Transmitting /etc/termcap still managed
1120 char/sec, so it looks like there must be a lot of interrupt
instigated context switching going on with voicemgr running.  Does
it matter which slot the voice power board is in?  I recall
somebody mentioning that the various slots have different interrupt
priority levels?...

I noticed that when voicemgr is running, I notice both the red and
yellow LEDs on the motherboard blink about 5 or 6 times a second,
while the normal state for my 3b1 is about once a second for the
red LED and every few seconds for the yellow LED.

I have 2 megabytes of RAM installed on my system.  I modified
sysinfo to display the size of the free pool on the status line.  I
have about 550 K free with voicengr running, so I don't think I'm
getting thrashing due to having to page.


Bill
wtm at impulse.UUCP    or    wtm at neoucom.edu