[Wine] Heavy Weather / Serial Port issues

[Dan Armbrust]

A while ago, I was using a much older version of wine on Fedora Core 3
- and attempting to  get a program called HeavyWeather (which has a
serial port connection to some weather monitoring hardware) to work
correctly in wine.  I was having a lot of issues with how wine was
handling the serial port.

We had much discussion - which kind of ended at the conclusion that
wine was handling serial traffic in a _very_ expensive manner - but no
better solution was suggested at the time.

http://www.nabble.com/Wine-%2B-serial-port-basically-hangs-system-tf1530875.html#a4176227

It didn't help that I couldn't get to the current build of wine
either, due to massive font problems between wine and fedora that I
was never able to properly correct.

I ended up continuing to use the older version of wine, which barely,
kind of worked for short periods of time.

Jump to the present.

The OS has been reinstalled - same slow computer (550 MHz).   I'm now
running Ubuntu 7.04.  I installed wine from ubuntu - which installed
wine 0.9.33.

In this install, the fonts are much better - good work there - and the
weather app worked right out of the box.

However - when the app comes up - it uses 100% of the CPU.  And it's
_really_ _really_ slow.  When the GUI comes up - it makes requests via
the serial port to get the data for about 15 different fields that are
displayed.  With an older version of wine (same hardware) - this took
about 2 seconds to get all 15 fields.  Now, it takes about 5 seconds
_per field_ to get the data.  Eventually, all of the fields fill in -
but CPU usage stays locked at 100% - and any interaction that I try to
have with the application is really slow.

The application then crashes within 3 to 4 minutes.

Now, I know my hardware is not very fast, or modern.  But there is no
way this silly little 50 dollar weather station should have the
processing power to swamp my PC.  Something is not being handled very
efficiently with the serial port access, and it has gotten much worse
in recent versions of wine.

Can anyone give me any suggestions on how to make it work better - or
what sort of debug information I can provide you to give you some
insight into what is going wrong?  Are there any options I can tweak
that may impact how wine deals with the serial port?

Thanks,

Dan