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Re: Sampling Rate Failure

To: Steve Hudson <shudson@io.com>, geez@autox.team.net
Subject: Re: Sampling Rate Failure
From: Byron Short <bshort@AFSinc.com>
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2000 15:55:06 -0700
Steve,

The GEEZ Palm recorder tracks it's own sample rate to ensure
that things are running appropriately.  Generally, as a Palm
gets more and more fragmented in memory usage, the sampling
rate can begin to deteriorate somewhat.  This is not a
function of how much free memory is left, it seems, but
rather of how much is used.  If the sample rate drops to 9,
the software interpolates the missing value, and goes on as
normal.  Same at 8.  If the sample rate drops to 7, 6 or 5,
the software issues a warning to that effect, and still
interpolates the missing values.  However, if the sample
rate drops to 4 or less, the data is essentially no good,
and no missing values are interpolated.  However, the run
may still be readable.

However, let me qualify this a bit.  A sample rate of 1 is,
well, as far as we've seen, not going to happen the usual
way.  Rather, I suspect that the problem was a bad
connection of some sort, that managed to get reconnected
prior to completely losing the connection.  If this is the
case, and if you aren't getting messages such as this on a
regular basis, I'd try to see if the data has any obvious
holes in it.  There's a 9/10ths of a second gap in there
somewhere, but it may be hard to detect.  The run is
probably still readable and usable, but I wouldn't make any
earth-shattering decisions from it.  There's no way to know
exactly where the error occurred.  

Again, I suspect that in this particular case, you actually
had a disconnect-reconnect sequence in the data, rather than
a true low sampling rate problem.  However, if you are
experiencing low sampling rate problems, I would suggest
unloading any unused items from your Palm, and running a
memory defrag program.  There are a few of them out there,
I'm told.  Because I use my Palms only for GEEZ, I've not
had this problem, but I have seen it on other machines.  
BTW, what Palm model is this?  Have you had other sampling
rate warnings or failures prior to this?

--Byron


Steve Hudson wrote:
> 
> I downloaded a run from my Palm today and I got the following error message:
> "Sampling Rate Failure- one or more seconds in which the sampling rate fell
> as low as one per second."
> Any one know what this means?
> 
> Steve Hudson

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