[RTTY] RTTY Skimmer Server computer hardware needed to handle WPX without throttling

[Pete Smith N4ZR]

Hi Jeff.  For whatever it is worth, here's what I did this weekend.  I'm 
running an AMD FX8350 (passmark 9000+) with 8 GB of RAM.

1.  turned off CW skimming for the weekend.
2.  Set up low band and high band rotation at sunrise and sunset, 
running 4 bands at a time
3.  Limited coverage to 96 KHz
4.  Tailored my RTTY segments, starting with the "Contest" default 
setting, to make sure I wasn't listening where the RTTY wasn't. The most 
important change was to define two RTTY segments for 40M, 7040-7050 and 
7080-7120.  I think I probably missed some Region 2 and 3 activity in 
the gap, but also got rid of a lot of that pesky CW stuff.

The best I was able to get was 440 decoders. All 8 cores were engaged at 
the same levels.  Whenever the CPU usage would spike over 70 percent, 
throttling would occur.  The number of decoders would drop fairly 
sharply (down to 350 or so), then rebound to at or near the critical level.

A preliminary look at the RBN traffic for the weekend suggests about a 
quarter of the CQWWCW daily totals(all modes).  I made about 29,000 
spots per day, and I don't hear very well - certainly as compared to WZ7I.

73, Pete N4ZR
Check out the Reverse Beacon Network at
http://reversebeacon.net,
blog at reversebeacon.blogspot.com.
For spots, please go to your favorite
ARC V6 or VE7CC DX cluster node.

On 2/17/2015 6:50 PM, Jeff AC0C wrote:
> I ran Alex’s RTTY Skimmer Server over the WPX contest weekend and had a tough time decoding multiple bands without throttling, even though the PC it was running on is pretty stout.
>
> If you ran RTTY Skimmer Server over WPX and managed to do so on multiple bands without throttling, I would be very interested to know what your computer configuration was.  I need to put together a new box for this task and have no idea how to size the hardware.
>
> 73/jeff/ac0c
> www.ac0c.com
> alpha-charlie-zero-charlie
>
> _______________________________________________
> RTTY mailing list
> RTTY at contesting.com
> http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/rtty
>