MFOC: Performance Stability Issues fixed by high CPU Usage

Hi all,

I've been doing some research involving smart cards and have to say lib-nfc is great! During my research I have come across what might be some interesting information. I am not sure if this relates directly to lib-nfc or pcsc-lite but thought I'd post here to start with.

Whilst carrying out my research I noticed that lib-nfc was much more stable and faster when I was running a separate CPU intensive program. For example when trying to obtain the keys using mfoc without CPU application it would be very unstable crashing every couple of minutes and getting one key if I was lucky. However when running mfoc with CPU application it would run for 30 minutes plus and get 10-15 keys. Another example is using pynfc to dump all the data from the card, without the CPU application it would pause for up to a minute 3-4 times during a single card dump. With the CPU application it dumps all the data from the card in a few seconds.

Obviously maxing out the CPU isn't a very elegant solution, my theory is that by maxing out the CPU it is slowing down requests to the hardware and preventing it from locking up. Either way I was hoping that providing this information someone could help come up with a more elegant solution.

Versions:
lib-nfc: 1.5.0- from google code
pcsc-lite: 1.7.4
mfoc-0.10.2 - with improved version from here: http://code.google.com/p/nfc-tools/issu … %20Summary
Reader: touchatag/tikitag ACS ACR 38U-CCID 01 00 / ACR122U102

Thanks,
Zak