Axis unresponsive/very slow to update

Hi all,

I'm having a problem with the Axis GUI where it is very slow to update itself after any change. My mill will switch on and can be homed and jogged around using the keyboard, while Axis is still showing 'OFF' and is mostly greyed out. Version is LinuxCNC 2.8.4-1-gb7824717b, on Debian 10. The live plot and DRO readings take a minute or two to update on their own, but if I cycle through my tabs (Preview/DRO/NativeCAM) using F4, when I return to Preview it's updated to show the correct machine position and the expected live plot. Note that this doesn't work for getting Axis to show that the machine is on, it just takes a couple of minutes to do that whichever screen is selected. Some operations e.g. touching off an axis, will cause the live plot and DRO to update.

Control is via MESA cards. Latency test shows jitter is comfortably under 20,000. The PC is a Dell Optiplex 9020, 8GB RAM, SSD drive, Intel Core i5 4-core, integrated Intel HD graphics card. I don't think it should be struggling to update the GUI!

This machine has been up and running on LinuxCNC 2.9, with Axis updating in realtime just fine. I had to revert to 2.8.4 as I'm a heavy user of NativeCAM. I keep my configs on github, so had saved hal and ini files etc. there while installing 2.8.4, and git-cloned them back once linuxCNC was up and running again.

Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this?

Thanks,
Andy

 

Update, in case anyone else has this problem:
In my .ini file's DISPLAY section is a variable CYCLE_TIME

old setting: CYCLE_TIME = 100
new setting: CYCLE_TIME = 0.05

tried this after reading about it here: linuxcnc.org/docs/devel/html/gui/axis.html - It seems axis was updating every 100 seconds.

That would be correct for 2.8. It was changed in 2.9 to allow milliseconds to be specified.
linuxcnc.org/docs/2.8/html/config/ini-co...tml#_display_section