The Eye Tribe

Actually, this is a bug report for the eyeTribe server. (Is there a better place to make this report?)

I make the following observations:
* while the tracker is successfully tracking both my eyes, the server utilizes 2-5% of available CPU power.
* while the tracker is searching for my eyes, the serer utilizes 100% of available CPU power.
* if I throttle the server process to 25% CPU usage (through processor affinity) it appears to work equally well.

I conclude that a lot of processing cycles are wasted by the server.
This is a big issue for me personally, since I run the server from a tablet that normally cannot use AC power. Setting CPU affinity is only a partial solution, since I feel the processing needed is lower than 25% in my tablet's case.

I have Approximately the same behavior (on a Windows 7 DELL T3400 bi-Xeon with tracker at 30Hz frequency) :
- 80~90% CPU usage while not tracking
- 10~20% CPU usage while tracking

But I am not certain that is a bug, on the contrary, I think that the server is optimized: the analysis algorithm may need that high amount of CPU to "search for eyes" in the frame while not tracking. While tracking, the previous position of eyes are known, so it is more easy to find eyes just near the previous known position.

As I have said, I can't notice the difference in responsiveness by the software when I force it to use only 1/4 of the processing power from before. Even if there is a small performance improvement, the cost/benefit ratio is unreasonable. At the very least a balanced power consumption / performance should be an config option of the server.

By the way, my CPU is an Intel Core i3-2310M @ 2.10GHz, 2100 Mhz

Thank you for reporting this.

We are aware of the high CPU usage when not in front of the tracker, and have a fix for this in the next release, which is due the next week.
Stay tuned!

FYI release has been pushed to next cycle (2 wks) due to build configuration changes.

Guys we have a new version released, let me know if it delivers satisfactory. Enjoy