Well, darn. As wonderful as the program seems at first glance, I'm sad to report that Bray's Terminal is not without its problems.

I was getting some unusual results while using it a few days ago to log some communications traffic in order to debug a problem I was having. Eventually, using a very simple test unrelated to the original problem, I found that the Terminal program sometimes fails to log everything that's sent to it.

I haven't run any exhaustive experiments, but this problem seems to be worse at the higher baud rates (I originally encountered the problem at 115,200), and especially when you have display mode set to hex. Based on these to observations, I'm guessing that Terminal simply can't keep up with the incoming data.

Another bit of evidence to support this guess is that, with logging turned off and the display mode set to ASCII, the Windows Task Manager showed that Terminal was using 99% of the available CPU time when I sent it a continuous stream of data at 115,200 baud. This dropped to about 84% at 57600 baud, and 27% at 9600 baud. These figures didn't change significantly when I turned on logging. However, when I changed the display mode to HEX, I had to reduce the baud rate to 2400 (!) before the program could keep up with the incoming data.

There needs to be a big YMMV here somewhere because the program's performance almost certainly depends on the computer it's running on. For the record, I ran the experiments described above on a 1.7 GHz Dell Laptop with half a gig of RAM--admittedly not a state of the art screamer, but not exactly a dog either.

Anyway, you have been warned.

-- Russ