Performance Alerts - even a novice can understand in Puppy

What features/apps/bugfixes needed in a future Puppy
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gcmartin

Performance Alerts - even a novice can understand in Puppy

#1 Post by gcmartin »

This thread is inspired by discussion that have raged over the last 4 years on RAM.

We are ALL aware of industry advances we have seen in both desktop (this includes laptop and others named "PC"s) technology and in the internet speeds. Thus, there is the combination of increased speed and increased volume.

In Puppyland, specifically, the issue of size/volume (this applies to all sorts of views) is still an issue and continues to be part in parcel discussion.

One thought that I have ONLY seen in one other vendors offering which I think can be very usefully applied in Puppy products is one of a visual-audio alert system on the system's desktop/taskbar reflecting current system resources.

On some PUPs, the taskbar has a graphical representation of RAM, but, many, if not most of us ever take the time to really understand it or use it. This doesn't mean its useless, rather, it has good information.

But, suppose that graphical contained a threshold which would sound an audible or reflect visually in some alerting way to indicate that the system is running critically short of the resource(s) that the graph reflects.

Were this the case, it could make it extremely easy for any user to understand and investigate methods of resolution.

There are 3 system areas that this type of alert could address. CPU utilization, RAM exploitation, and primary system partition utilization. And, considering the multimedia aspects that MOST, if not all, Puppy users have in their PCs, this alert could even be a vocal message addressing the user.

As many in the community already know, the system contains this information and it is in real time.

Is this reasonable?

Please share your views on this.

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8-bit
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#2 Post by 8-bit »

In my case, I have an indicator on the task bar that some see as memory usage when in fact, it is an indicator of the pupsave file's status.
And I have a 3gig pupsave with 1.92gig free that still shows an orange indicator color that would normally mean one's pupsave file free space is low.
I do not know how the threshold is figured.
But it seems that with a large pupsave file size, the orange indicator is in error.
I could cut down the size of the pupsave by combining installed pets into an add-on SFS file.
But I do not want to have to have backing up the SFS addons along with the pupsave as an acceptable means of backup.

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greengeek
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#3 Post by greengeek »

Yes, I think an "alarm" function would be very helpful (maybe it already exists but I just don't know how to set it up...).

Conky is great, but it still does not penetrate my conciousness when there is a problem. For example - I am continually running out of laptop battery because I forget to turn on the wall power. The battery icon is flashing but I just don't seem to see it. If it was possible to turn on an audible alarm, or something like a pupsay splash over-riding all other windows it would be great.

Similarly with ram usage - if it were possible to set a threshold beyond which a pupsay splash would pop up it would more likely make me aware about what type of activities were choking the system. That might prompt me to turn off Flash, or switch on adblock etc etc.

Setting a Pupsave threshold that would bring up a warning spalsh would also be good. I guess I really only look down at the taskbar when I have nothing better to do...

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01micko
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#4 Post by 01micko »

freeramdaemon .. I made this for the olpc-1.0, might go part of the way, for RAM at least. Probably needs work.
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greengeek
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#5 Post by greengeek »


amigo
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#6 Post by amigo »

Under linux there is no need to manage RAM directly, hence no need to display any warnings. While possible to flush RAM (clear the cache), it is entirely unnecessary and may actually slow things down by flushing out programs which you subsequently want to use.

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Q5sys
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#7 Post by Q5sys »

amigo wrote:Under linux there is no need to manage RAM directly, hence no need to display any warnings. While possible to flush RAM (clear the cache), it is entirely unnecessary and may actually slow things down by flushing out programs which you subsequently want to use.
+1

Sometimes habits from windows users die hard. lol.

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Q5sys
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#8 Post by Q5sys »

While not a task bar icon... glances is a CLI tool that can seem to do some of what you want.
It requires python to run, but gives a good overview of whats going on in your system. You could just run a full screen shell window with it running it and keep it minimized, then when you need to know whats going on, Alt-Tab to maximize it. It has color coded levels so if something is awry it'll stand out from the rest. Someone could modify the source to include a gtk popup anytime something reaches 'critical', if they desperately need that functionality.

Here is a screen cap of it running on my netbook with backtrack installed.

Image

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greengeek
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#9 Post by greengeek »

I'd like to incorporate this aswell:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=74702
I want to figure out a way of generating audible warnings as well as visual.

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sunburnt
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#10 Post by sunburnt »

amigo`s correct ( as usual ), the O.S. flushes anything not being used to free ram.
To monitor ram only shows you it`s taken up, as the O.S. leaves things for reuse.

Ram is never full if you have a swap file, so there`s no need to worry or monitor it.
You could run all of the average Puppy`s apps. at once and it`d take under 500 MB.

New PC users often confuse ram and HD space, not understanding the difference.

The exception: No-Swap PCs need a ram monitor. There`s a forum thread on this.

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