And the Winner Is...

[Tom Droege <tdroege@veriomail.com>]

Rob now has his code working so we can compare the results:

Tom        QuickBasic       64.48 Seconds
Rob         C and CFITSIO  37.12 Seconds
Andrew   Pascal                35.12 Seconds

All tests were made on a 500 MHz K6 in a DOS window with no other windows 
open.  It is also run with an ALT ENTER which gives windows the full 
screen.  This may make a difference.  Note that the programs slow down a 
lot, as much as a factor of two, if a second window is open.

Tom is not writing a .fts header so the raw files need a processing step 
with RawToFits with will take a few seconds per file.  Note that this only 
takes a few seconds, so it is much faster to read a file, add a .fts header 
and then write it back to disk than it is to read from the memory card and 
write a disk file.  Obviously most of the time is taken reading the memory 
card with an 8 bit wide I/O instruction.

Rob is using C and CFITSIO which wirtes out an "official" looking .fts 
header.  He is also writing out some test data so it is possible that the 
program will speed up a little when that is removed.

Andrew is coding in Pascal and makes up his own .fts header.

It looks like we are running up against the brick wall of the I/O speed.  I 
am curious as to how Chris gets to 20 seconds.

OK, this is just great and a near halving of the present run time with 
QBasic.  It also writes out the .fts headers on the first pass.  The 
remaining job is to have the program read in two files that I will write in 
a specified format to put arbitrary things into the .fts header.  I 
envision a constants file which contains things like location name, 
lattitude and longitude, etc..  The second file will be changed each time 
the program runs and writes a file and will include things like shutter 
open times and RA and Declination of the telescope.  OK, you experts will 
have better names for these files, I will fix my QBasic code to write 
anything requested.  I hope I can write straight .txt files.

Thanks to everyone who has worked on this so far.  This will help a lot.

Tom Droege