Unexpected delay of capturing

[phillie08]

Hello all,
this is a problem reported by a friend. I recommended SC to her since I use it for quite a while. But she encounteres one serious problem:
After having set up everything she took a few screenshots. The capturing started only after a delay of a couple seconds, both while capturing the active window and the whole screen.
Now I thought it was an easy to solve problem and asked her to check the options. But she insists there is no check mark at the delay option. Even with delay checked but 0ms chosen the same thing happened.
I have no clue what is going on especially since I never had that problem.
She had just downloaded and installed the latest version, I think 4.8.

Any idea anyboy?
Thank ayou for your time.

[tomos]

Is it every screenshot - or just the first after an inactive period?
If only the first, the second paragraph below might help

First, check to make sure you don't actually have the delay option enabled.
You can find that in the tray menu under Capture Options -> Use Delay.

Assuming not, see if it's only the FIRST capture that is slow, after not having used SC in a long time, with subsequent captures being fast.  If so, you should try the option that cmpm mentioned about changing the "Inactive Memory Use".  In this case it could also be a hard disk that's sleeping, for which there is no easy fix.

(see also previous post for more details)

[phillie08]

@Tomos: Thank you for your answer.
It is not just the first screenshot, it started right from the getgo and never quit.
The "Use Delay" thing was my first thought but my friend swears she checked it multiple times.

Latest news: Now things are getting really weird. I sent her my Ini-files and told her to overwrite hers (the SC ini-files that is).
Result: She is excited that things are working well now -  without delay - but only in full screen mode (screen-current monitor).
Taking shots of the active window works with that delay again.
Now I'm really stuck. Aside from the fact that obviously we use different computers the only difference remaining is she has SC 4.8, I have 4.72.

[veriod]

This is going to sound crazy, but I also experienced random-seeming problems where a capture is often instant, but can often be delayed by a few seconds as well. It's seemingly not related to processor or IO spikes either. Now here is the crazy part. I think it's caused by systray icons (not even necesarrily ScreenshotCaptor, but another application) being involved in some sort of blocking operation.

What I noticed is that my screenshots are usually instant. But, I have a systray mail checking program that checks every few minutes. When it does this the icon changes to a lightning bolt, it does some involved operation where it logs into a server and checks for mail, and then the lightning bolt disappears. Whenever the lightning bolt is active, ScreenshotCaptor's icon will go red to start a capture, but the capture will not occur until the lightning bolt disappears.

Since my mail app (PopTray) does several accounts in a row, every 5 minutes it will cycle as like so:

Normal state (~5 minutes) -> Bolt (5 seconds) -> Normal (1 second) -> Bolt (5s) -> Normal (1s) -> Bolt (5s) -> Normal (~5 minutes)

If I capture (or spam capture) during bolt 1, the systray icon will stay red until the bolt vanishes, capturing nothing, then rapidly capture many images in that 1 second gap, then continue to "block" screenshots until the next gap, etc. As long as there's no bolt there everything is fine.

I realise this sounds crazy... how in the hell is a POP mail checker stopping screenshots? But I believe the systray is the key. That is the only space these two applications share, and something in there is causing one to block the other.

This may not be the reason for your problem, but it's something I noticed and it's a possibility.

[mouser]

Hi veriod, and welcome.
It's an interesting theory, however let me throw a bit of a wrench into the mixture.

Screenshot Captor turns the icon red before it begins its various steps of capturing a screenshot, and then turns it back when it finishes.
What that means is that when the icon sticks red for a bit, and then turns blue after a delay, it means that for some reason it took an unusual time to do the steps taking the screenshot -- not necessarily that the delay was in flashing the icon.  Does that make sense?

There are two two main alternatives to consider:

The first is -- does the delay in capturing the screenshot only ever occur once, if you haven't used SC for many hours -- and then not occur again until you stop using it for many more hours?  (or does the delay go away if you go and change the option in SC to "stay in memory longer")?  If this is the case, then the delay happens because after a long period of disuse, MS Windows may swap Screenshot Captor memory out of physical ram and it may take a while to wake up -- or because the disk drive where SC is saving the screeenshot has gone to sleep.

Alternatively, as your post suggests, it happens even if you are using SC regularly, and it happens when your mail app is checking -- it might very well be that your mail program is triggering some events that are dominating the cpu.  This might even happen because a firewall or antivirus tool is jumping in.  If that's the case then it wouldn't be just SC that it would have this delaying effect on but any other application.  I have noticed on my XP machine that some network slowdown events (i think caused by my software firewall) can actually cause a multisecond pause in every application trying to read the disk drive.

I would very much like to hear if you can narrow it down and definitively blame the pop mail checker (or an antivirus or firewall or network effect).

If you can cause this problem to happen very regularly, then i could try to send you a special debug version of SC that would log lots of events and could help us narrow it down.

Another way to check if the problem has to do with blocked disk access, would be to temporarily go to the "Miscelaneous Tweaks" tab and check the "Don't Auto Save Captures" option.  That will avoid the automatic save-to-file step so if the delay is due to disk writing that would solve the problem.

[mouser]

phillie08 wrote:

Result: She is excited that things are working well now -  without delay - but only in full screen mode (screen-current monitor).
Taking shots of the active window works with that delay again.

ok, well that may due to the special active window transparency capture option that is set by default.

Read this post about how to turn that off and i believe it will remove the delay completely for active window capturing:

• http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=35938.msg336055#msg336055

[Gunpower]

I also experienced a strange delay during capture of Google Chrome. It doesn't bother me because i don't usually capture a screen from Chrome. Other windows are captured instantly. I deactivated the options in window Capturing 1 and 2.

[mouser]

Gunpower can you try this:

Under "Capture Options" tab, uncheck the "Retrieve and store URL string.." option: