Show the process icons be disabled by default? (speed increase, less RAM)

Jeremy Collake · July 11, 2011, 10:30:13 AM

As many may notice, the process icons gradually fill. This is because we do not want to overload the disk with I/O when Process Lasso's GUI is loading. It would be better to do without the process icons (an option in the View menu). The 'Active Processes' tab has no icons, for instance. These icons occupy considerable RAM and must be retrieved from the disk.

This is a change I am seriously considering in this next build, so please let me know your opinions

. As always, this software is for YOU!

edkiefer · July 11, 2011, 12:22:09 PM

I never really checked what options in PL view affect resources . For me disabling icons saves like 2k in working set . I always have icon enabled though its not real important with name and descriptions right on the line .
The Graph enable/disabled shows biggest change, this being disable does seem faster where icons I don't really feel a difference expect for memory count . Graph seems to eat like 1/2 of the total so bigger chunk .

I personally think option3 , although all are really fine as long as option is there to turn on/off .

Ed

Hotrod · July 11, 2011, 02:30:05 PM

Sometimes I find things running that give poor descriptions or no evidence at all what they are or where they came from. I could probably use the tools included in PL or a hard disk search, but having an icon can be quicker for a novice to identify. Once I know what everything is and what it does, I usually turn off these icons on my slower(resource challenged) machines. Having them as an option helps alot for quick identification. I think you should keep them as they are and allow the user to enable/disable as needed(IMHO).

P.S. Yes the graph seems to use up much more resources on my challenged machines than the icons do. I also kill the graph once i have things set the way i want them.

Jeremy Collake · July 13, 2011, 01:18:48 AM

The icons are mostly an issue on the first load of the GUI, but also slow things down every time it has to add a process to the listview.

You are right that the graph is otherwise the big resource eater. I am working on more ways to optimize it (always am), though it is already pretty optimal. As with all 'fancy pants' things this takes resources.

Fortunately all these things can be disabled with Process Lasso. Perhaps I should create a SINGLE option to run in 'MINIMAL RESOURCE' mode.. Hmm...

edkiefer · July 13, 2011, 10:19:03 AM

Quote from: jeremy.collake on July 13, 2011, 01:18:48 AM
The icons are mostly an issue on the first load of the GUI, but also slow things down every time it has to add a process to the listview.

You are right that the graph is otherwise the big resource eater. I am working on more ways to optimize it (always am), though it is already pretty optimal. As with all 'fancy pants' things this takes resources.

Fortunately all these things can be disabled with Process Lasso. Perhaps I should create a SINGLE option to run in 'MINIMAL RESOURCE' mode.. Hmm...

Ok, only time I see anything remotely slow is when GUI loads , the icons take split sec or so to load ,but minimize/close/open GUI I don't really notice much there (thats why I just leave them on ).
I think your doing great on it as I remember the graph was little laggy, now seems better .
adding another option to run with more things off (graph/icons etc ) I guess be good to, then again ultimate resource cutter is not to even load GUI at all

Jeremy Collake · July 13, 2011, 12:11:44 PM

Quote from: edkiefer on July 13, 2011, 10:19:03 AM
Ok, only time I see anything remotely slow is when GUI loads , the icons take split sec or so to load ,but minimize/close/open GUI I don't really notice much there (thats why I just leave them on ).
I think your doing great on it as I remember the graph was little laggy, now seems better .
adding another option to run with more things off (graph/icons etc ) I guess be good to, then again ultimate resource cutter is not to even load GUI at all

I should note that the slow/gradual process icon load is intention, trying to space out the load time. That is why they gradually fill up, just to be clear. I do not want to overwhelm the system, as users typically open the software during high system loads. The side effect is that it makes the loading appear oddly slow and inefficient. I need to put this in the FAQ. You likely know this, I was just clearing this up for any readers who read this outta context or wrong.

Jeremy Collake · July 15, 2011, 06:51:40 AM

While experimenting in v5.0.0.37 (unreleased), I found a flag to force using the 'fallback' process icon in situations where the process icon retrieval would take a while. What this means is that I can go and use the last cached icon and not go retrieve it from disk if the system considers that a slow process. This has proved to be a huge speed boost. The downside is that the last cached icon might be wrong, but that's unlikely. It can later be updated with whatever non-cached icon is eventually retrieved. This also fixes the issue where processes without icons had blanks - now they have 'default no-icon' icons. The downside is more RAM is used. I am taking a closer look at my multi-instance icon reuse to see what else I can do. I believe the 'no icon, icons' are not getting re-used right and this will mitigate the icon RAM use increase.

I am glad I switched to this newer, more complex mechanism of icon retrieval. I knew it would come in handy. There is a 'simple' way to do it with one API call. Then there is this way

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edkiefer · July 15, 2011, 09:21:49 AM

Is that similar to how web browser bookmark icon work ?

Jeremy Collake · July 15, 2011, 11:39:56 AM

The 'shell' is what is responsible for looking up icons for whatever (files, drives, devices, ...). Your web browser itself is a little different as web page icons are retrieved from a file called favicon.ico on the web server, and cached in the web browser file cache. So, I depends on your perspective I guess.

edkiefer · July 15, 2011, 12:19:01 PM

right, i just meant they were stored/cached by browser .

Jeremy Collake · July 15, 2011, 02:24:29 PM

Yea, if the icons all over your PC weren't cached, there would be a lot more I/O, to say the least. Sadly, one of the most common things to 'screw up' on a PC is the shell icon cache. In fact, I've considered adding a function to Process Lasso to force this cache to rebuild. However, this seems outside the range of Process Lasso, so I may put it in a new collection of freeware tools likely called 'Bitsum Functions'. Just a random collection of PC maintenance stuff that doesn't belong in Process Lasso but is too easy not to offer.

Jeremy Collake · July 16, 2011, 04:41:22 AM

I was thinking about it, and you were probably also referring to images of all types cached from web pages. I hear icon and think of a specific image type. Definitely the caching concept is the same, except in one case network I/O is trying to be avoided and in the other case disk I/O is being avoided. For web browsers there are actually two caches, a memory and a disk cache, and both are used to avoid the slower network I/O whenever possible. There are multiple layers of overlapping caches cascading throughout any modern PC, from the highest level to the lowest. Making these caches operate as efficiently as possible is a big factor in system performance.