file_sink and performance monitoring

GNU Radio 3.8.2.0, CentOS 7.  NDR-358 front end.

I am working on a modification to GNSS-SDR (which is an application built upon gnuradio). It has the option to add a file_sink as a consumer of nearly every block. However, if I enable dumping in one of the upstream blocks, the performance downstream changes, as if data is being dropped so the demodulated signal becomes incoherent.

 

Conventional wisdom is that file_sink is very slow, so I can imagine that adding it to my flowgraph causes things to back up enough that we can’t keep up with the real-time input. (As an aside, file_sink could probably improve performance by setting an output multiple so it is called less frequently)

 

In trying to troubleshoot/characterize this situation, I added a monitor thread to periodically dump buffer stats for my signal source (it was originally monitoring a different block, which is why it prints both input and output buffer stats):

 

void stats_thread(gr::block* item)

{

    while (true)

    {

        std::this_thread::sleep_for(1s);

        LOG(INFO) << "source: "

                  << "\n    input  0 full: " << item->pc_input_buffers_full(0) << "%"

                  << "\n    input  0 avg:  " << item->pc_input_buffers_full_avg(0) << "%"

                  << "\n    input  0 var:  " << item->pc_input_buffers_full_var(0) << "%"

                  << "\n    output 0 full: " << item->pc_output_buffers_full(0) << "%"

                  << "\n    output 0 avg:  " << item->pc_output_buffers_full_avg(0) << "%"

                  << "\n    output 0 var:  " << item->pc_output_buffers_full_var(0) << "%"

                  ;

    }

}

 

My output always prints 0 for each of these numbers.

 

Do these methods work? Is there some other direction I should take to identify the problem? I’m willing to write a non-blocking archiving module, but if I can’t prove I’m overflowing the buffer, I need to re-think my strategy.

---

Jim Melton

Principal Software Engineer

Sierra Nevada Corporation

 

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