Author Topic: NANY 2014 Release: Process Piglet (Read 84228 times)

wraith808 · « **Reply #25 on:** January 03, 2014, 05:07 PM »

Hmm. "...And then does this a few times without compacting."

Maybe. But then I'd wish the browsers would do their own compacting and go "back down" to a sensible size. I guess it's a vestige bit of being a luddite where I just hate to see "huge" memory usages for viewing what should be a "simple" web page. Maybe the Plugins get involved too.

Update:
I still don't like seeing 416 megs used, but I have spotted a "process Palemoon.exe has gracefully lowered its memory use" message!

-TaoPhoenix (January 03, 2014, 04:15 PM)

Garbage collection is very processor intensive in many cases. So you'd get into a position where your browser was regularly slowing down your machine rather than just appearing to use a lot of memory.

TaoPhoenix · « **Reply #26 on:** January 03, 2014, 06:27 PM »

Hmm. "...And then does this a few times without compacting."

Maybe. But then I'd wish the browsers would do their own compacting and go "back down" to a sensible size. I guess it's a vestige bit of being a luddite where I just hate to see "huge" memory usages for viewing what should be a "simple" web page. Maybe the Plugins get involved too.

Update:
I still don't like seeing 416 megs used, but I have spotted a "process Palemoon.exe has gracefully lowered its memory use" message!

-TaoPhoenix (January 03, 2014, 04:15 PM)

Garbage collection is very processor intensive in many cases. So you'd get into a position where your browser was regularly slowing down your machine rather than just appearing to use a lot of memory.
-wraith808 (January 03, 2014, 05:07 PM)

Some of all this does matter though, because I have an older laptop with only 500ish megs of ram! So I def see performance lags on that laptop, so if the browser is using that all by itself, then the laptop might be desperately caching to keep up.

mouser · « **Reply #27 on:** January 04, 2014, 10:49 AM »

Is the memory being reported the WS Private or the WS Sharable?
A good explanation that goes into it better than I can: http://cybernetnews....ory-usage-explained/

This is a good question -- the memory use statistic is a confusing thing.

In Process Piglet you can choose whether the program should look at Working Set or Virtual Memory (or an average of the two):

NANY 2014 Release: Process Piglet

Essentially, as I understand it, Working Set (the default metric used) is the Physical Memory actually currently being used exclusively by the given process. This is a reasonable measure of how much of a hog the process is, and is what MS listed under "Mem Usage" in the task manager (at least on Win XP). Now Windows will allow processes to reserve more memory and can keep some of this memory paged-out of physical ram. The total memory being addressed by a process is the Virtual Memory size, and can sometimes be significantly larger than the physical memory use of the program.

Truthfully none of these provide a complete view of how badly a processes memory use is going to affect your computer, but as these values increase into the hundreds of megabytes, and keep growing, there's a high likelyhood you're going to start to feel the slowdown.

The aim of Process Piglet is to spot conditions that look like they might be of concern, and rely on user to decide if they really are something to worry about.

Some resources discussing memory that i've found useful:
http://stackoverflow...n-winxp-task-manager
http://msdn.microsof...04%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
http://blogs.technet...8/11/17/3155406.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.co...mory-shell-game.aspx

wraith808 · « **Reply #28 on:** January 04, 2014, 11:59 AM »

Yeah... memory usage is a big black hole at times. Even on Windows XP where it shows the Mem Usage- that's a combination of WS Private and WS Shared.

There's three sets from what I understand- the virtual memory (which I didn't even touch on), the Private Working Set (the memory recently touched by the application and not a candidate for Garbage Collection) and the Sharable Working Set (the memory not recently touched and is a candidate for Garbage Collection). Windows uses the Free memory first- it's easier to allocate, and is not a big processor or disk I/O drain.

It might be good to include a summary of memory usage and perhaps links to a couple of non-technical (or less technical) explanations, so that people that download that don't have an idea of how memory work have a better idea of how to use process piglet.

Some of all this does matter though, because I have an older laptop with only 500ish megs of ram! So I def see performance lags on that laptop, so if the browser is using that all by itself, then the laptop might be desperately caching to keep up.
-TaoPhoenix (January 03, 2014, 06:27 PM)

Actually, it still doesn't, even with less memory. The only way to make it not matter, is not to load the memory in the first place.

Ever been working for a while on your machine, then all of a sudden the disk light comes on and the entire machine just grinds to a halt? Even your mouse might start flaking out, or not move at all. And it might seem like your machine is completely locked. But if you wait for a while (a few minutes- maybe even 10-20 in bad cases), the machine becomes usable again?

That's Garbage Collection at work. When there's no more physical memory, the machine pages everything out to disk, then starts to stack them up in order by process so that the memory is nicely arranged, and the free memory is collected from each process, and at the end of the stack. It takes a while, and uses up your entire processor.

And because of how intensive it is, a programmer can't even make it happen in a managed programming language (most of the more recent ones). You can request it to happen as soon as possible, but you can't make it happen. Mostly because it's something that you should let the OS take care of by design.

mouser · « **Reply #29 on:** January 04, 2014, 12:09 PM »

It might be good to include a summary of memory usage and perhaps links to a couple of non-technical (or less technical) explanations, so that people that download that don't have an idea of how memory work have a better idea of how to use process piglet.

yes, that's a good idea, i will do so.

the other thing i will try to add is some reporting on and alerting on generic conditions that might suggest the system is having trouble with memory -- by looking at free memory and page faults, etc. I'd love to hear any heuristics that you might suggest that would avoid false alarms.

i'm by no means an expert on windows memory issues -- so i'd really welcome help figuring out which metrics (both process-specific and system-wide) would be good for Process Piglet to pay attention to -- i'm open to performing some more involved computations, but the raw data is coming from PROCESS_MEMORY_COUNTERS_EX.

wraith i'm looking at you!!

mouser · « **Reply #30 on:** January 12, 2014, 09:03 PM »

v1.01.12 - Jan 12, 2014
[Feature] Added option to play sound on alert.
[BugFix] Fixed issues where alerts were not visible behind other windows.

rgdot · « **Reply #31 on:** January 14, 2014, 06:08 AM »

Mentioned on ghacks

Scott_Y · « **Reply #32 on:** January 14, 2014, 11:40 AM »

... MS Sec Essentials is usually the one that gets out of hand for me, but it's an AntiVirus so I don't know what I can really do about it except let it do its thing.
-TaoPhoenix (January 02, 2014, 08:21 AM)

You might try to find out if MS Security Essentials is using a lot of memory scanning a particular process. If so, and if you are sure that process is safe, you could try excluding it from MSE scans (go to MSE settings > Excluded Processes).

B4Marc · « **Reply #33 on:** January 14, 2014, 11:45 AM »

This is great, I was looking for a program that can tell me when a pc game got some memory leak,

Thank you

mouser · « **Reply #34 on:** January 14, 2014, 12:14 PM »

I hope it's useful for you B4Marc -- do keep in mind that there is no way to explicitly check for memory leaks in other programs, and Process Piglet is not magic. But it may help you identify any really bad memory leakers who keep using increasingly large amounts of memory.

mouser · « **Reply #35 on:** January 14, 2014, 12:43 PM »

Mentioned on rgdot

mouser · « **Reply #36 on:** January 14, 2014, 12:43 PM »

v1.01.14 - Jan 14, 2014

[Feature] You can now toggle alerts on or off (from options or quickly from system tray menu), to reduce annoyances. When alerts are off, events are still logged in Operations Log (in Options) for troubleshooting after problems.
[Change] Reduced occurrence of repeated alerts as memory use quickly goes down or up.

longrun · « **Reply #37 on:** January 14, 2014, 05:11 PM »

Great little utility. Opera v11.64 is using 623 MB, but I've got about 40 tabs open.

Interestingly, CrashPlan is using only 241 MB on my machine. I wonder how much this varies by machine or OS. I had horrible CPU usage problems with CP on my XP machine; they've completely disappeared on my Windows 7 notebook.

Can someone explain how Firefox, which has millions of users and dozens or hundreds of contributors, fails to correct this basic flaw?

In March 2005 I joined DC after downloading mouser's Process Tamer, which I still use occasionally. Nine years later here's Process Piglet.

rgdot · « **Reply #38 on:** January 14, 2014, 07:03 PM »

Thanks for the mention mouser

mouser · « **Reply #39 on:** January 14, 2014, 07:09 PM »

don't be so shy about posting on dc when you write something on your blog! when you write something about software (dc or otherwise), make a post about it. the least we can do here is be a place we can talk about our writings and projects.

Scott_Y · « **Reply #40 on:** January 16, 2014, 12:30 AM »

Process Piglet doesn't report processes such as svchost.exe and MsMpEng.exe (MS Security Essentials). I'm curious why that may be. Thanks.

mouser · « **Reply #41 on:** January 16, 2014, 02:01 AM »

It should; it does here.

One thing to remember is that when piglet starts up it checks the memory use of these processes, and thereafter reports when they grow significantly beyond their initial memory use.

If that doesn't clarify the issue, give me some more details regarding what you think it should be doing and what it isn't doing.

TaoPhoenix · « **Reply #42 on:** January 16, 2014, 02:47 AM »

It should; it does here.

One thing to remember is that when piglet starts up it checks the memory use of these processes, and thereafter reports when they grow significantly beyond their initial memory use.

If that doesn't clarify the issue, give me some more details regarding what you think it should be doing and what it isn't doing.
-mouser (January 16, 2014, 02:01 AM)

Quick guess is that those progs remain stable in memory though at a bad CPU use when they misbehave. I haven't bothered to check MsSecEss memory wise, but CPU wise could be a good feature because it def gets grouchy when I open a folder with 47 shortcuts and it has to resolve them, it freaks out. (MsSecEss)

oblivion · « **Reply #43 on:** January 21, 2014, 02:03 AM »

Read this with some interest, and I've shoved The Piglet onto my netbook to see how it behaves.

Neat little program. (And I also think the name, and the associated notifications, are a tiny bit fabulous: "Process firefox.exe has pigged out!" I think this is the first notification I've seen that's really made me smile since an old DOS program gave me "Unknown error: get drunk!")

I'd like to cast a vote for leaving it separate to Process Tamer: I use Process Lasso to look after cpu usage but Piglet's a useful adjunct to it, whereas I wouldn't want to risk running PL and PT alongside each other...

mouser · « **Reply #44 on:** January 23, 2014, 04:22 AM »

Nice write up at "Dave's Computer Tips" by Jim Hillier:
http://www.davescomp...with-process-piglet/

And at Lifehacker Australia:
http://www.lifehacke...indows-applications/

And here: http://www.drakeinte...2/12/process-piglet/
And here: http://www.softpedia...Process-Piglet.shtml
And here: http://www.trishtech...sage-process-piglet/

Joe Hone · « **Reply #45 on:** February 10, 2014, 10:42 PM »

Featured today at freewaregenius: http://www.freewareg...are-check-nany-2014/

mouser · « **Reply #46 on:** February 13, 2014, 08:51 AM »

Mike Williams at betanews wrote an intelligent review of Process Piglet:

http://betanews.com/...-with-process-piglet

There are plenty of more sophisticated ways of monitoring RAM use, but Process Piglet is still a likeable tool, easy to use and very configurable. If you're having system resource issues and want to track what applications are doing over time, then we'd give it a try.

J-Mac · « **Reply #47 on:** May 17, 2014, 11:16 PM »

Mouser,

Any way to alter the initial read of the memory? As soon as I open Firefox Piglet starts squawking. I believe that the initial "average" of Firefox memory is too low. Otherwise why would it immediately start flagging Firefox when Firefox's memoiry usage is not increasing very much at all?

No way to manually override the memory setting?

Thank you.

Jim

mouser · « **Reply #48 on:** May 18, 2014, 11:20 AM »

Stay tuned I will add an option to let you tell Piglet to take a longer time to establish baseline memory use for processes.

mouser · « **Reply #49 on:** May 18, 2014, 11:39 AM »

Just a quick check -- it looks like my code gives processes a very generous 30 seconds to establish a baseline memory use.. That should be enough to prevent "As soon as I open Firefox Piglet starts squawking".

So there should be no alerts for any process until its been running for at least 30 seconds. If we find that isn't true then it's a bug. Any insight into whether your alerts were coming before firefox was running for at least 30 seconds?