DonationCoder.com Software > Finished Programs
DONE - Memory utilization
kfitting:
Gave the program a try this morning and took it over to the guys who had requested it... it does the job! A few suggestions (you may already be working on these I dont know):
- The GUI is a little obtuse. I didnt realize at first that you had to have UsageMon "running." maybe putting a toolbar button or something so this is more apparent would help. What are the other "set" commands (GDI, etc)? Do they monitor other resources for each process?
- Could you make two alarms available? One (a warning) at some limit, and then another one if the memory continues to climb past a second limit (less of a warning, more of an alarm... maybe center of the screen)? See below for the reason why.
- Could you make UsageMon remember it's settings? This way you could set it to monitor an exe and when you exited and restarted, UsageMon would be already configured to watch for the desired program.
- What is the refresh rate for updating the watched process? It seems to be a little slow for when the process first goes above the threshold, after that, it's fine. Could this maybe be an option? (Like from 1 to 30 seconds or something)
- Can the text of the alarm be customizable? This is a very unimportant request... one of the guys at work just thought it would be funny to have a message like "You idiot, what are you doing?"
Talking with our CAD admin (he's the one who came up with the request), what he would like to be able to do is put usagemonitor on someone's computer and have a script run it whenever our CAD software starts. That's the reason for making UsageMonitor remember settings, or even be able to be programmed for certain settings. Basically, he wants to make user interaction not necessary. You start the CAD program and UsageMonitor goes to work.
The reason an alarm is needed is because some of our drawings use over 2 gigs of memory. Unfortunately, the CAD program doesnt quietly tell you it's about to crap out on you because of a memory problem, it just exits! That's the reason for the two alarms, one to say "hey, you're getting high," and a second to say, "you're about to blow."
But, overall, the program works for what I had requested. THanks a lot for giving your time to coding it!
Kevin
Veign:
- The GUI is a little obtuse. I didnt realize at first that you had to have UsageMon "running." maybe putting a toolbar button or something so this is more apparent would help. What are the other "set" commands (GDI, etc)? Do they monitor other resources for each process?
-kfitting (September 12, 2005, 07:05 AM)
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I already know this. First release (should have been beta) and I didn't include a help file or do much on ToolTips. This will get better for future releases. The interface was based on the WinXP Task Manager and will get better with each release.
Good idea with the toolbar.
You can set alarms forany or all of the objects: Memory Usage, GDI Objects and User Objects.
GDI Objects are what gets used when applications use graphics type command. I had a memory leak in my Jeweled Button ActiveX and this tool would have help me monitor the GDI Objects.
- Could you make two alarms available? One (a warning) at some limit, and then another one if the memory continues to climb past a second limit (less of a warning, more of an alarm... maybe center of the screen)? See below for the reason why.
-kfitting (September 12, 2005, 07:05 AM)
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This is something I was unsure about. How to set the alarms. Should there be a single limit or upper / lower limit. I can easily make the alarm trigger at the limit with a warning and another alarm when it goes X% above with a critical warning.
I would really like to flesh this one out as its something I was unsure on how to handle. Lets discuss this topic further. Two limits set by the user? or based on a percentage of increase? Should they be different names like: Warning Limit / Critical Limit?
Also, the alarm was done quickly and will be re-evaluated in future releases.
- Could you make UsageMon remember it's settings? This way you could set it to monitor an exe and when you exited and restarted, UsageMon would be already configured to watch for the desired program.
-kfitting (September 12, 2005, 07:05 AM)
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This is not something that really could be done. The key to a process is its ID. You can see from Usage Monitor that process can share names but not ID's. Process ID's are not based on the application and therefore are issued new ID's each time the application starts. There would be no way to start monitoring a process on Start and be sure that it is the exact same process as before.
Let me think on this one as I understand your need.
- What is the refresh rate for updating the watched process? It seems to be a little slow for when the process first goes above the threshold, after that, it's fine. Could this maybe be an option? (Like from 1 to 30 seconds or something)
-kfitting (September 12, 2005, 07:05 AM)
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Refresh rate is set at 15 seconds. Options screen maybe be added in future releases. I just need to think of how many options I could have - ideas of what else you would want as an option?
- Can the text of the alarm be customizable? This is a very unimportant request... one of the guys at work just thought it would be funny to have a message like "You idiot, what are you doing?"
-kfitting (September 12, 2005, 07:05 AM)
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This is something I would probably not do right now as most users would not need and the amount of work would be too much. Maybe in a future, later release...
Thanx for the feedback. Please keep it coming. I will have a new release coming out in a couple of days to resolve some minor issues (like you can type letters in the limit input box - had the code to prevent but forgot to wire in).
kfitting:
Yeah, the GUI I understand... far better to get the core working before concentrating on looks!
Regarding:
- Remembering settings: this is a highly important feature (though I understand the complexity involved!) Could you maybe have an option to go off of a process name? In many cases this would be enough (though, as you mentioned there are some that use the same name... but something would be better than nothing). Or, is there a way you could work around it? Like, being able to script UM so that it automatically grabs the next process that starts with a certain name. This way, you could start UM and then start your program and it would automatically grab it. Just some ideas.
- Alarms... A two limit alarm sounds good to me. The critical level is more for "hey, you're almost out of memory here!" or if you know a program crashes at a certain memory limit. I dont know if you meant this, but another type would be one that changed based on some increment over a given time (like 10 meg/20 min). This type of alarm isnt necessary for the CAD app, but it would probably come in handy for developers. Would you be able to have both types working at the same time? One other thing, could the position of the alarms be made customizable? Once again, not a very important request, but it would be kind of nice to have some alarms come up in the center of the screen (like critical alarms).
- Customizable Alarms: I agree entirely... as I said is was more of a joke type thing!
Any other questions on my questions/comments, let me know.
Kevin
Veign:
kfitting,
Not sure if you have to change the topic title to DONE..
kfitting:
Ok.... I think I did it. Not real sure though...
Kevin
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