Process Restraint problem

[weeuweed]

First off, process lasso is really a great program. It really makes a difference when you have lots of program running simultaneously.. However, i noticed that everytime i run my audio player (winamp) or watching video, i would experience a millisecond hang. This only occurs when process lasso is doing process restraint (the yellow bar in the graph) and also when the process lasso icon in the taskbar changes to traffic light icon.

Am i doing something wrong and is there a workaround to this problem? 

[Jeremy Collake]

What process(es) is it restraining when you experience the lag, and are they related to winamp in any way?

If they are not, and I assume they aren't, then the problem could be the very short burst of CPU utilization and/or disk I/O by the core engine and/or GUI. The very marginal amount of disk I/O is due to the log being written to (by the core engine) and read from (by the GUI, if open).

However, this small burst of CPU utilization and disk I/O is *very* minimal, so I wouldn't have anticipated any sort of lag resulting from them under any circumstances. I am simply exploring possibilities, however remote they may be. You may want to experiment with disabling writing of log events for ProBalance restraint and/or ensuring the GUI is minimized to the system tray or closed completely.

[weeuweed]

No.. winamp was running independently.. Even watching movies sometimes with process lasso, it would lag for a millisecond randomly.. The only memory intensive program running was firefox. And before installing process lasso, it's perfectly smooth, listening to music wouldnt get interrupted even if you encode some video..

[Jeremy Collake]

Hmm... that's strange. Something is to blame for what you see, so we'll have to investigate more. I suspect your system is at its maximum workload and the high priority processes of the governor and lasso are pre-empting the real-time audio of winamp as they enforce a ProBalance restraint. Therefore...

My suggestion(s):

• Try lowering the default priority of ProcesLasso.exe and/or ProcessGovernor.exe. Lowering their priority will ensure that any short spike in their activity won't interfere with WINAMP. Since they are running at a high priority, they may be pre-empting the winamp process for a millisecond. Try lowering them to Normal for now, to see the impact.
• Lower the sensitivity of ProBalance. It may be that its going off too frequently in your case, and you just want to cover the worst case scenario. Adjust the ProBalance Parameters to lower the sensitivity. For instance, make the time over quota before restraint much higher.
• Try keeping the GUI completely closed (no system tray icon). As long as processgovernor.exe is running, it will restraint processes. This will help determine if the GUI's short burst of resource use after a restraint event has any impact on the problem. You can load the GUI every once and a while and check to see what it has done. Granted, it may be frustrating not knowing what its doing, but doing this test for a day or two will let us know if the problem is related.

Thanks for the report. Hopefully we can get to the bottom of it to make sure you, and no other users, are affected by any sort of phenomenon like this. The process of tweaking Process Lasso is delicate, as the default settings aren't perfect for everyone. Based on user feedback, I adjust the default settings in cases where they don't result in theoretical best case conditions.

[weeuweed]

Seemed to work fine now.. Winamp has been running for hours without me reliazing the milliseconds hang were gone. I tried some of your suggestion but PL would revert back to the previous setting after a reboot. The only difference i made seemed to be enabling Gaming mode. 

[Jeremy Collake]

Thanks for reporting back. That's interesting, though disconcerting that your settings changes were lost. I need to investigate how that could have occurred.

If gaming mode works, then I'd say you've found a good temporary solution to your problem. Still, I am going to take some action on this feedback and see if I can't improve the product in cases such as yours. Its a difficult chore to make the default settings applicable to all possible PC environments, and while the settings are generally very successful, there is always some room for improvement.