new option suggestion

[Brian the Roman]

In the new text client it would be nice if there were an option which would allow users to suppress only the 'ASCII Art' part of the output. Other than an indication of time spent on the current structure, the output is useless anyway, and it has a few issues:
1) it misleads some users into thinking that the screen layout actually represents the physical structure, which I understand, it does not.
2) its removal should speed the client up marginally. I don't know how much work is done in the drawing compared to the algorithm itself, but it isn't zero. I therefore assume the client would be at least marginally faster.

What do you guys think?

ms

[pointwood]

The CPU-time spent drawing it is practically none. It has been discussed before in the forum, so search for it if you like :)

[grobinette]

You can always use the -qt switch to turn it off.

What I have seen on win 98 boxes is that using that switch lowers CPU usage of VM:foldtr~1 from 10 or 11% to .04%. I don't see that process on my XP box and don't know about other OS's.

[matrix_fan]

i like your thining BRIAN.They should have 2 clients. One with and one without

[AMD_is_logical]

The overhead of drawing those graphics varies widely depending on how the client is run. In some cases the overhead can be pretty bad, like when it is run from a terminal window from inside KDE on certain linux distros.

When I first started DF, I wished there was a switch like Brian the Roman is asking for -- one that would just get rid of the graphics and screen-clears. I'm pretty used to the -qt switch now. I do leave the program interactive when uploading from my small cluster, though. Since it is upload-only there are no graphics, but it would be nice to be able to supress the annoying screen-clears.

[matrix_fan]

YOU RIGHT!!!!:thumbs: :cheers:

[StrategyFreakAMD]

Yeah, I used to run it with the graphics, but now I run it as service and just let it run.