Author Topic: StartWatch 0.6.0 Release Candidate 2 (Read 21527 times)

tinplate · « **on:** October 29, 2006, 10:56:50 PM »

Just put up a new version (0.6.0) of StartWatch
http://www.softwx.com/windows/startwatch.html

Whats new (see release notes for full list)

Added CPU usage to program status display.
Added CPU Hog protection - option to restart programs monopolizing the CPU.
Improved hang detection.
Added ability to set the starting priority of a program.
Added option to play sounds when alerts occur.

I'd like to get some feedback on the CPU usage display from someone having a true multi-processor system so I know it displays the correct values on that configuration.

The minimize programs option still has some issues, mainly having to do with the programs doing their own minimizing and restoring of their own window after they start, and sometimes a while after they start. If a program has its own "minimize after start" feature, it's better to use that than have StartWatch minimize it, because the program knows better when its real main window has been opened and initialized. Sometimes the first window a program opens is not the real main window, but it's difficult for StartWatch to know this, so it may minimize the wrong window for that program when it starts.

Steve

Mark / Ohio · « **Reply #1 on:** October 29, 2006, 11:33:42 PM »

By golly Steve I think you nailed the VWS issue!

I've run it through startup 2 times now with crash and hang monitoring on. It turns yellow for 24 sec. then to light green. Also when I closed StartWatch and it shut down the programs, VWS was slow to close but it did close. Would not close it before. Now I'll move on to learning and trying some of the other settings.

tinplate · « **Reply #2 on:** October 29, 2006, 11:47:11 PM »

VWS has an "interesting" startup sequence. I ended up having to add the CPU usage features ahead of schedule in order to handle the VWS startup properly without degrading the hang detection for the rest of the programs.

Glad to hear it works on another computer too, and not just on mine.

I also modified the code that figures out which of a program's windows StartWatch should send messages to (like the close message). That's probably what fixed the not closing thing. VWS opens several windows, and StartWatch was probably picking the wrong one. It's not quite as easy as it would seem it should be to determine from the outside what the "main" window is for a program.

Steve

Mark / Ohio · « **Reply #3 on:** October 30, 2006, 01:33:11 AM »

Just and FYI at this point.. I was doing some testing by shutting down programs manually then letting StartWatch restart them. Not sure if I might have unsettled something during the process.

StartWatch detected a hang or crash of VWS while I was looking at the different options in it and restarted VWS about 23:50. Then at 00:00 when VWS started to download my metars, Wunderground forecasts etc., StartWatch detected a hung or crashed condition and restarted VWS. Two settings I then changed, increased check interval from 5 to 30 seconds, and in VWS ftp settings lowered ftp priority from high to normal. No recurrence since. 01:00 metar, forecast, and other downloads plus 01:05 uploads no problems.

Other monitoring settings that are the same now as before the VWS restarts occurred are as follows:
Leak Protect OFF
CPU Hog OFF

All other options in monitoring turned on.

tinplate · « **Reply #4 on:** October 30, 2006, 09:17:09 AM »

You shouldn't have to fiddle with the check interval to solve those issues. If StartWatch is working right, the check interval is really only to control how much time StartWatch eats up. If StartWatch was monitoring a lot of programs all with 1 second check intervals, that might be a noticable draw on the CPU. I recommend 5 second check intervals.

I've put a new version (0.6.1) on the website that fixes a minor bug and has some tuning adjustments to help avoid false positives on the hang detection. Let me know if this helps.

Steve

Mark / Ohio · « **Reply #5 on:** October 30, 2006, 09:45:31 AM »

Downloading the new update...

Up until now (09:35) I show one instance at 02:20 that it restarted VWS again since I last posted. My MS Defender would have been running a scan about that time. VWS V13.00p20 has been real stable for me. So it probably was a false trigger. I'll reset VWS to original settings and check interval back to 5 sec with the update and let you know how it goes.

Mark / Ohio · « **Reply #6 on:** October 30, 2006, 02:36:51 PM »

Umm Steve, I think we have a problem with 0.6.1.26RC

Check Interval is 5 sec.
VWS FTP priority set to high.

I've turned off crash and hang monitoring for now. Also detecting a problem with Image Salsa and WeatherLink which I did not see before. Notice in the tray the multiple instances running. This is the first time I'm using 5 sec. check interval. Wondering if that is why some of these are showing up now that did not before. (466MHz, Win XP Home SP2)

W3DRM · « **Reply #7 on:** October 30, 2006, 03:18:05 PM »

Steve,

Have just installed 0.6.26 RC2 and am seeing the following:

1- Installation went smoothly - no apparent problems.

2- Noticed that the pdf file included in the 0.6.26 RC2 release is still shown as being for v 0.5.0 RC1 dated Oct 26, 2006.

3- Have all watched processes (VPLive, VirtualVP & VWS) except for StartWatch set to minimize on startup. Only VWS is automatically minimizing after it gets started. The others have to be done manually.

4- VWS is being detected as "Locked up or hung..." every few minutes when the Check Interval is set below 10 seonds. Have set it to 10 seconds and VWS seems to be running okay (about 10 minutes so far).

5- Thanks for implementing the "audio alert" feature. It give a nice heads up when processes go awry!
Am continuing to watch and see what else is happening.

W3DRM · « **Reply #8 on:** October 30, 2006, 04:07:35 PM »

Steve,

I agree with Mark there is a problem with StartWatch monitoring VWS. VWS ran for about an hour before StartWatch detected a "Locked or hung..." condition. I have increased the Check Interval for VWS to 15 seconds to see what happens.

I also had a hit on VPLive shortly after the VWS hang detection but I think that was because VWS was trying to restart at the same time VPLive was trying to send data.

Mark / Ohio · « **Reply #9 on:** October 30, 2006, 08:02:15 PM »

Steve,
Just returned your email with some added information.

Don,
I'm still having the minimize intermittent with mainly WeatherLink, VWS only stayed on screen once after numerous restarts. I have the internal minimize on start checked on it. When it flags VWS while it is running for you, does it go straight from light green to red with no yellow?

I've only caught it once so far while watching and that's what showed for me. You know the old saying a watched pot never boils.

Update: Just seen it again 8:00pm our time. No yellow, light green straight to red. The grace period must not be activating after the program initially starts to run.

W3DRM · « **Reply #10 on:** October 30, 2006, 11:30:11 PM »

Quote from: "Mark / Ohio"

Don,
I'm still having the minimize intermittent with mainly WeatherLink, VWS only stayed on screen once after numerous restarts. I have the internal minimize on start checked on it. When it flags VWS while it is running for you, does it go straight from light green to red with no yellow?

I've only caught it once so far while watching and that's what showed for me. You know the old saying a watched pot never boils.

I have only seen the yellow on VWS but then, I haven't always been watching the computer when it happens either so I'm not sure if it ever goes red or not. Have been getting occasional VWS restarts all evening but no particular pattern in them. VPLive and VirtualVP also are getting hangs around the same time as VWS so I suspect they are related.

VWS still won't minimize consistently. Seems to be an intermittent thing on my system.

Mark / Ohio · « **Reply #11 on:** October 31, 2006, 12:58:20 AM »

I tested StartWatch with the Hanger program. Unlike with VWS I do get a yellow before a restart with it. Weird..

Virtual VP and VPLive have never been flagged, WeatherLink once, VWS and also Image Salsa are the main trouble for me.

tinplate · « **Reply #12 on:** October 31, 2006, 01:51:49 AM »

I've put up a new verson (0.6.2) to address hang detecton issues and a bug in the CPU calculation.
http://www.softwx.com/windows/startwatch.html

It's late and I can't test anymore until tomorrow, so this is not had a lot of testing. But I wanted to put it up for the brave beta types to try out.

Steve

W3DRM · « **Reply #13 on:** October 31, 2006, 12:27:10 PM »

Have downloaded and installed 0.6.2.30 RC2. It started up fine and I haven't had any hangs or other problems after running for about 45 minutes.

I dropped the Check Interval for VWS back down to 5 seconds (it was at 15 seconds). So far, so good...

Steve, what do the items in the Alerts tab ("Make the StartWatch window visible" and "Switch to the Alerts tab") of the Help screen do? The user guide doesn't mention their functions.

Also, one thing I noticed when I started up after installing this latest version is that the alerts log file cleared out some but not all of the old alerts that had been recorded. Not sure why but they cut off all logs entries after 2:09pm yesterday afternoon and I had a bunch in it throughout the night last night.

tinplate · « **Reply #14 on:** October 31, 2006, 12:39:38 PM »

The Alerts tab of the Options window lets you specify ways to get your attention that a new alert has occured. The current things that cause alerts are a port going down, a port coming back up, a program going down, or the registration getting near expiring. I've made these ways to get your attention optional becaue I know some people get really annoyed by things blinking, popping up or making noise.

Make StartWatch visible just unhides the main window and brings it to the top of the windows stack when an alert occurs.

Switch to the Alerts tab switches the main window from the status page to the alerts page when an alert happens.

The sound options, let you play sounds when an alert occurs.

The manual is a little behind the features right now, but I'll get caught up once I get things stable.

Steve

W3DRM · « **Reply #15 on:** October 31, 2006, 01:00:54 PM »

Thanks for the clarification Steve. I just couldn't figure out what they did. Still running since 8:22am PST this morning and no alerts.

Mark / Ohio · « **Reply #16 on:** October 31, 2006, 02:23:42 PM »

Been up and running the better part of 5 hours now. I've been withholding early comment so as not to jinx it like I did the last time regarding VWS.

Of course if I were seeing alerts there would be no need for me to withhold comment.

Mark / Ohio · « **Reply #17 on:** November 01, 2006, 09:56:09 AM »

Well I will get bold now and admit StartWatch 0.6.2.30RC2 is working great for me.

I've been up about 14 hours continuous and about 24 hrs total with no alerts. Last night I configured it to monitor one my Virtual VP's extra TCP/IP ports. I also manually disconnected Virtual VP and checked that everything shut down and restarted once reconnected. One thing I have not tried yet is the memory consumption monitor. I will need to study my memory usage of the programs closer before I know for sure what values to put in there. I know VWS has some fluctuation normally for me. Want to be sure I put in a value out side the normal fluctuations to avoid a false trigger. Right now I'm showing the following MEM usage in StartWatch:

VirtualVP 4.60 MB
VPLive 4.11 MB
WeatherLink 1.24 MB
VWS 53.79 MB
Image Salsa 47.85 MB

Has anyone worked out a rule of thumb as far as a % to add on for fluctuation and safety value?

Right now I'm thinking of setting it as follows:

Virtual VP 6 MB
VP Live 6 MB
WeatherLink 4 MB
VWS 70 MB
Image Salsa 60 MB

I guess I could just watch the alerts with those values and if it starts flagging memory usage too often on one increase it a bit more. I've seen VWS at 75 MB+ at startup but that was on older versions. (Running VWS V13.00p20 now.)

tinplate · « **Reply #18 on:** November 01, 2006, 11:10:56 AM »

released v. 0.6.3 see release notes
http://www.softwx.com/windows/startwatch.html

steve

W3DRM · « **Reply #19 on:** November 01, 2006, 12:12:14 PM »

Installing and running 0.6.3.35 RC2...

Mem usage immediately after intial startup is as follows:

VirtualVP 4.59MB
VPLive 5.38MB
VWS 67.96MB

Will watch these for a while and then set up the Mem usage alert to see what happens.

Mark - 70 to 75MB should be good for VWS but want to watch for a bit before I take the plunge...

tinplate · « **Reply #20 on:** November 01, 2006, 12:40:30 PM »

The next feature I will be adding is per program actions and info (right click on a program in the main window's status page and a menu pops up). One of the items will be Info, which will pop up a window with more detailed info on the program. Included will be more information about memory use, including peak memory use. That is the crucial piece of information you need to know to set a good value for the max memory option. My guess would be 10% or 1MB (whichever is larger) above the peak after 24 hours of running would be a good start.

Steve

W3DRM · « **Reply #21 on:** November 01, 2006, 02:33:43 PM »

Steve,

Latest version still running fine - no alerts so far

However, I did want to report a couple of things I noticed:

[/list]

tinplate · « **Reply #22 on:** November 01, 2006, 02:57:46 PM »

The memory leak is in VirtualVP, and will be fixed soon. It's just a minor bug in VirtualVP's shutdown procedure that was exposed by StartWatch.

I'll check into the minimize of already running programs. It was working for me during testing. I'll try to reproduce. If you can send me the sequence of actions that caused it, that will help.

Steve

Mark / Ohio · « **Reply #23 on:** November 01, 2006, 11:05:45 PM »

0.6.35 RC2 up and running about 8 hrs now. No false alerts so far.

Observations..

(1) All windows are minimizing for me with the exception of WeatherLink. That one's been hit miss in previous versions but it never has minimized in this version.

(2)Memory usage monitor and settings.. Decided to set this option up for the first time. Using Virtual VP for example I plugged in the value 5 thinking since it said MB next to the box it would know that meant 5MB. But when restarted gave a memory usage error. I then kept adding zero's and found 5000 was a number that would allow it to run without being flagged. So is this correct? We need to add the value like is shown for a K value in task manager?

(3)VWS shutdown...While testing VWS shutdown and restart, StartWatch will shutdown and restart the program as designed. But if I exit StartWatch and allow it to shutdown running programs, VWS continues to run. I used task manager to verify it was still using cpu a couple minutes later.

Will continue to terrorize the program and let you know if I find anything else that seems awry.

tinplate · « **Reply #24 on:** November 01, 2006, 11:35:37 PM »

1) I'm not sure why WL is not minimizing for you. I did some tests here and it is minimizing fine. I tried it with and without the bulletin mode option, and I tried it with StartWatch starting the program and also with WL already running when I run StartWatch. In all cases WL minimized. What version of WL are you running? Could you send me a screenshot of the program options page in startWatch for WeatherLink?

2) There is a bug in the leak protection that makes it not work. i'll be posting a fixed version with the next half hour. I the options, you set the max MB (which is the same units of measure that's displayed on the StartWatch status page). The values displayed in TaskManager are KB. You'd have to divide TaskManager values by 1024 to get the MB value that would be comparable to StartWatch's display. By the way, the bug was me making just that mistake! I was comparing a MB value to a KB value. That's why adding the 3 zeros made it kind of work. But that's fixed in the next version.

3) I've noticed this too. I think it's because when StartWatch exits, it sends a close message to the programs, but it doesn't wait around to see if they honor that request, so it can kill those that don't. It just sends the close messges and then exits.

I've been having a problem identifying the right window to send the close message to with VWS. It creates a whole bunch of hidden and off screen windows for various purposes. I'll do some more testing with VWS to get the close to work.

Steve

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Author Topic: StartWatch 0.6.0 Release Candidate 2 (Read 21527 times)