IDEA: Memory usage pie-charter

[SleepingWolf]

As you no doubt know, Folder space Pie Chart programs are prevalent, but I'm hunting for a program (or could be a Process Tamer feature, Mouser...) that will draw a pie-chart for memory usage per process / application (with or without System Idle Process). I think the whole world and his/ her dog will appreciate this one...  

Maybe have F5 as a refresh hotkey? Sound good to you?

I'm sure it must exist somewhere (I can't be the only one to have thought of it!) So has anyone found such a program?

And there must be other system aspects crying out for similar process-charting. Eg. bandwidth. Sound good to you guys? Any more ideas?

[barney]

You're not the only one, but there doesn't seem to be any such beast currently in existence <sigh />.

Capability might include memory per process, bandwidth (where applicable) per process, disk activity (read/write) per process, network activity (not bandwidth) per process, and a few others - 2 or 3 - that I cannot recall at the moment.

Ideally, 'twould show real time (marginally useful) or increments such as 1-2-5-10-15-60 minutes.  'Twould also, ideally, be selectable for the highest 5 or 10 processes.

Such a tool would be invaluable in long-term analysis of persistent problems/bottlenecks.  I used something similar on a DEC VAX system years agone for network server & disk activity, but cannot find that one any more, much less a Windows-capable one.

Hey, ideally, it would be (shudder) Java-based, thus multi-platform, eh?  Oh, yeah, it would have to be sparse on system resources, or it would report itself as the top user in most categories <ouch! />, and might affect reporting on other processes.

Addendum:  one of the forgotten ones is some measure of GPU usage or graphics activity per process.

Been looking for this - these? - for a decade, now, but no luck yet, and not smart enough to create on my own <bigger sigh />.

One hint might be the NeXuS dock - hover the cursor over the CPU icon, and it will display a pop-up showing the highest-usage process at that time along with the percentage of usage - usually Firefox for me.

[exMagus]

Getting a "real time" pie chart looks to me like it's going to use quite a bit of RAM and CPU.

[barney]

Me, too ... that's why I said marginally useful .  Might work on a gaming machine - might! - but the app would show using most of the resources, pretty well invalidating its purpose.

To my mind, most useful would be one minute, 5 minute, & 15 minute summaries ... one minute to show spikes, the others to show trends.  Hopefully, such an app would create one or more log files, then have a GUI to display the files as required.

Tried doing something like this with VB3/5 & the Win API many years back, but could never get it to work consistently, so couldn't trust the output.

[SleepingWolf]

Thanks for answering, folks. In case you're wondering, I did searches for this (concurrent to typing my query -rather than before as most intelligent life-forms would choose to do) and there was one thread here that sounded hopeful but was ultimately disappointing. So, it would appear that this beast is extinct.

Getting a "real time" pie chart looks to me like it's going to use quite a bit of RAM and CPU.

But so does Process Explorer and similar tools. One option the tool might therefore provide is an "Exclude this program from Pie" tickbox option.

Barneys programming experience here does not exactly fill me with hope though. Maybe programming Windows has got more reliable since...

[SleepingWolf]

I'm thinking now that this should have been a Process Tamer feature request as the little CPU histograms show that this data is already collected -so there would be little extra overhead. Some options for an instant snapshot or a trend line (and exclusion of system Idle process and/or the program itself from the chart) and some graphics should be easy (as pie) compared to the hassle of collecting the data in the first place?

Anyway, could some kind moderator move this thread or link to it in the Process Tamer feature request section?

[SleepingWolf]

I've noticed I started this post asking for a Pie-chart displaying Memory use rather than CPU use. This is because I'd obviously ideally like both, but either would be a step-up right now.

I've started a new thread (in which Mouser has shown some interest) in this Process Tamer board