Camera lag during save

[PeterL1]

I've been having an issue upgrading to 64 bit OS (win7) recently. I've finally got most of the things working except saving images. The setup is a Camera (connected via firewire card) from cooke corp (pco.1400). The images are captured by a program provided by cooke corp and then sent to a main program (via enqueue) so that I can save the images and control other parameters such as voltage. The issue arises when I try to save the images. The FPS drops from 7 to 3. This is an issue because of drift in the machine we're using. I would like to think this isn't an issue, but you never know. I have 1 SATA III 1TB (ST31000524AS) drive, with a write speed of over 100MB/s (connected likely to a 3Gb/s SATA port), I can't see why this would be the issue. I'm saving the files as .png (which usually are around 1.3 MB to 2 MB). 

The program itself also writes to a log file, this could be part of what is slowing it down? I'm not sure what else to say. I've included a copy of the program. I apologize for the lack of commenting and the poorly laid out structure. 

Peter

[Tim_O1]

Hi Peter,

I am a little unclear on what your actual issue is. Are you not able to save images? Do you get errors, what exactly happens (images are not saved, images are wrong format, images are distorted)? Or is your issue that the FPS slows down but you are still able to save images?

If you remove the writing to log files does that speed your program up?

Tim O

[PeterL1]

The issue is that the FPS slows and the camera becomes lagged when I take images. The problem has since been fixed by changing the compression of the saved file to no compression (png 1000) so hopefully it will continue to work!

[Joseph_Loo]

some of the information is a misnomer. If your drive has a potential of 100 MB/sec but that does not indicate you have the write capability. You nevr mentioned how full the drive is, fragmentation issues, how you allocate the space, etc. All of these issues plays into the drive speed. write. Also your system plays another major row. You did not indicate how busy your system is. If the system is heavily loaded, the speed of the writes will be impacted. Remember, windows is not a Real Time system (rt).

[PeterL1]

Well the computer itself is loaded with 32GB of ram, running a 2600K processor and rarely has more than the labview program running (aside from a few browser tabs, gmail and the like). The drive is essentially empty, can't be more than 15-20 GB of data on it (the image files pile up fast..), fragmentation shouldn't be an issue with a brand new drive should it? The drive is NTFS. 

[Joseph_Loo]

You can not count on that. In addition, NTFS tends to fragment the writes over other areas. It is constantly updating the mtf all the time. This causes a lot of head movement. The only way to really tell is to write the data out and defrag your disk a lot.