Author Topic: NANY 2014 Release: Process Piglet (Read 111,768 times)

mouser · « **on:** January 02, 2014, 12:22 AM »

Process Piglet is a tool that lives down in your system tray and monitors the memory use of running processes.

When it first sees a new application, it spends about 30 seconds observing its average memory use. This establishes a baseline memory use pattern for the application.

After that, Process Piglet will alert you if/when the application starts to consume large amounts of additional memory.

Frequently such behavior indicates a problem with the application, such as a memory leak.

When such an alert is shown you may ignore it -- you will be alerted later if memory usage continues to increase. Or you may ask Process Piglet to forcibly terminate and restart the application.

Web page and download: http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/ProcessPiglet/
Watch a video demo: here.
Or on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbsqhSX58w0

Screenshot, minimized in tray and alerting on bad behavior:

Screenshot, main window listing top memory hogs with quick actions to terminate or restart:

mouser · « **Reply #1 on:** January 02, 2014, 12:25 AM »

At this stage, Process Piglet has few options and nothing to tune and adjust.

Just run it and forget it -- it doesn't make any changes to your pc or do anything other than monitor memory use of other applications andl pop up and alert you if it detects a process misbehaving

It's likely that it will merge with and become part of my Process Tamer application later in 2014, as part of a major revamping of that tool.

mouser · « **Reply #2 on:** January 02, 2014, 12:34 AM »

Let me explain what motivated the coding of Process Piglet.

Every so ofter i notice my browser and often my entire computer is slowing getting less responsive and grinding to a halt.

When this happen I open up the task manager, and inevitably I discover that some application, almost always the Firefox web browser, os starting to consume GIGABYTES of memory.

Now I like Firefox quite a bit, and i'm not ready to give up on it -- but i need an easy way of getting some advance notice when it's going to shit the bed and start leaking memory, and an easy way to restart it when it does.

That's the kind of situation Process Piglet is for -- it should help give you an early warning when an application is starting to leak memory or otherwise get out of control in terms of memory consumption.

Where Process Tamer was designed to detect applications that were using high amounts of CPU, Process Piglet is designed to find applications that go crazy with memory use.

One important thing to understand is that Process Piglet does *NOT* have an absolute notion of high memory use -- it only cares about when applications start to consume increasingly large amounts of memory -- so it won't detect an application that immediately reserves a ton of memory, and it won't detect an application that barely uses any memory and leaks a tiny bit. It's much more focused on catching the sneaky perpetrators that gradually use up all your memory without you noticing until it's too late.

rgdot · « **Reply #3 on:** January 02, 2014, 01:06 AM »

Why didn't you do this when I asked a while ago? http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=35209.0 ;

Not exactly this but the motivation was very very close.

mouser · « **Reply #4 on:** January 02, 2014, 01:12 AM »

Well now that I've dived back into this realm, we should revisit some of these ideas -- Process Piglet was just meant to be a toe in the water, I do hope to add more customizable event detections, etc.

rgdot · « **Reply #5 on:** January 02, 2014, 01:36 AM »

Will use this as is and look forward to more, thanks as always

mouser · « **Reply #6 on:** January 02, 2014, 03:57 AM »

First post updated to show that new version main window now lists the top memory consumers, with right-click menu to terminate, restart, or explore. That's a bit more useful I think.

(The top memory consumers list shows a list of all processes eating more than 50mb, sorted with highest-offenders at the top; it will be updated live whenever the form is on screen).

mouser · « **Reply #7 on:** January 02, 2014, 04:56 AM »

You can now use options to give yourself a very small window of top memory consumers that can be made to stay on top of other windows. Maybe useful if you want to keep an eye on something:

tomos · « **Reply #8 on:** January 02, 2014, 11:29 AM »

Love the name & icon

TaoPhoenix · « **Reply #9 on:** January 02, 2014, 02:21 PM »

I'd be surprised if the "Firefox Twins" (FF and Pale Moon) really chew up that much memory per se - 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.

Update:
It/They apparently do. Here's Process Piglet at work catching Palemoon jumping up 100 megs:
[attachimg=#]

Update2:
This little tool is growing on me. PaleMoon jumped from 300 megs to 411 megs! No wonder my poor laptop with only 500 megs struggles to run it!

And PaleMoon was supposed to be "optimized" for Windows!

So I guess I'm a little sad that in 2014 it takes 411 megs to render a set of webpages.

mouser · « **Reply #10 on:** January 03, 2014, 12:30 AM »

Updated first link with a video:

.

Ath · « **Reply #11 on:** January 03, 2014, 08:40 AM »

Small issue maybe; with high memory values, ProcessPiglet is reporting negative numbers:

while the overview windows show normal, positive, values:

System is Windows 7 x64, with 16 GB total RAM

mouser · « **Reply #12 on:** January 03, 2014, 09:00 AM »

Oops!

Can you re-download the new version and let me know if i fixed it?

techidave · « **Reply #13 on:** January 03, 2014, 11:23 AM »

nice app, Mouser. I just downloaded it on my Win 7 system. I noticed that Firefox with 5 open tabs was consuming around 275 meg. I changed one tab to Facebook 9still only 5 tabs open) and the usage went up to 350meg.

how interesting. I change it back to the original tab which was a national weather service page and it dropped to 288 meg.

the more FB tabs i have open, the more memory it uses.

tomos · « **Reply #14 on:** January 03, 2014, 11:38 AM »

^ you're doing well there Dave - my FF starts at 400+mb and goes up from there (also Win7 but x64 - maybe it depends how much memory is installed).

Edit// meanwhile the associated FlashPlayer plugin is using 1383mb... (playing a YT video is hard work!)

techidave · « **Reply #15 on:** January 03, 2014, 12:20 PM »

Mouser, I got the following error when I installed this at work. My computer is part of a domain and the document folder is redirected to the server, hence the F drive.

it says: ATTN: Error Creating Log file
\\fserver\xxx\dave\my documents\donationicoder\processpiglet\operationslog.txt

so how do i fix this?

techidave · « **Reply #16 on:** January 03, 2014, 12:24 PM »

it won't let me save the ini files either. same reason. it redirected to H and not F drive. Also since I am not win 7, it should just be DOCUMENTS folder and not My Documents.

Ath · « **Reply #17 on:** January 03, 2014, 01:24 PM »

Quote from: mouser on January 03, 2014, 09:00 AM

Can you re-download the new version and let me know if i fixed it?

Now I get nice positive values in the message, great

mouser · « **Reply #18 on:** January 03, 2014, 01:59 PM »

Thanks Ath.

techidave, you can edit the ConfigDir.ini file to tell it where to save files.

techidave · « **Reply #19 on:** January 03, 2014, 02:35 PM »

it appears its working after that. i just removed the slash marks in front of CONFIGDIR=.

no errors at the moment.

thanks, Mouser

TaoPhoenix · « **Reply #20 on:** January 03, 2014, 08:54 PM »

Well I had thought that PaleMoon/Firefox "had solved the memory leaks". Apparently according to piglet, not exactly.

Can someone explain what the browser is *doing* with all that space? You can go to some random webpage (not even a video) and all of a sudden it spikes!

skwire · « **Reply #21 on:** January 03, 2014, 09:13 PM »

Beautiful little app, mouser. I really like programs like this. One app, one purpose.

wraith808 · « **Reply #22 on:** January 03, 2014, 09:30 PM »

Quote from: TaoPhoenix on January 03, 2014, 08:54 PM

Well I had thought that PaleMoon/Firefox "had solved the memory leaks". Apparently according to piglet, not exactly.

Can someone explain what the browser is *doing* with all that space? You can go to some random webpage (not even a video) and all of a sudden it spikes!

Well, I will say that I do have a question in regards to PP...

If you look at memory like a series of cells
(with U= in use, and F = free)

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

And then load a program

UUUUUFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

Then the program has to do something, i.e. load a tab, that will spike usage for a brief time

UUUUUUUUUUFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

And then gives that memory back... though its not contiguous

UUUFFFFFUUFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

And then does this a few times without compacting, because nothing else needs the memory currently...

UUUFFFFFUUUUUFFFUUFFFUUFFFFFFFFFF

What would PP show in that case? Because that's a lot of the way that memory management in a garbage collected world works. Working Set is the current size, in bytes, of the Working Set of this process. The Working Set is the set of memory pages touched recently by the threads in the process. If free memory in the computer is above a threshold, pages are left in the Working Set of a process even if they are not in use. When free memory falls below a threshold, pages are trimmed from Working Sets. If they are needed they will then be soft-faulted back into the Working Set before leaving main memory.

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.com/cybernotes-windows-memory-usage-explained/

TaoPhoenix · « **Reply #23 on:** January 03, 2014, 10:15 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 · « **Reply #24 on:** January 03, 2014, 10:48 PM »

I eventually turned it off now that I know how silly programs can get.