Alpha Software Mobile Development Tools:   Alpha Anywhere    |   Alpha TransForm subscribe to our YouTube Channel  Follow Us on LinkedIn  Follow Us on Twitter  Follow Us on Facebook

Announcement

Collapse

The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

The Alpha Software Forum is a free forum created for Alpha Software Developer Community to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share solutions. Alpha Software strives to create an environment where all members of the community can feel safe to participate. In order to ensure the Alpha Software Forum is a place where all feel welcome, forum participants are expected to behave as follows:
  • Be professional in your conduct
  • Be kind to others
  • Be constructive when giving feedback
  • Be open to new ideas and suggestions
  • Stay on topic


Be sure all comments and threads you post are respectful. Posts that contain any of the following content will be considered a violation of your agreement as a member of the Alpha Software Forum Community and will be moderated:
  • Spam.
  • Vulgar language.
  • Quotes from private conversations without permission, including pricing and other sales related discussions.
  • Personal attacks, insults, or subtle put-downs.
  • Harassment, bullying, threatening, mocking, shaming, or deriding anyone.
  • Sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory jokes and language.
  • Sexually explicit or violent material, links, or language.
  • Pirated, hacked, or copyright-infringing material.
  • Encouraging of others to engage in the above behaviors.


If a thread or post is found to contain any of the content outlined above, a moderator may choose to take one of the following actions:
  • Remove the Post or Thread - the content is removed from the forum.
  • Place the User in Moderation - all posts and new threads must be approved by a moderator before they are posted.
  • Temporarily Ban the User - user is banned from forum for a period of time.
  • Permanently Ban the User - user is permanently banned from the forum.


Moderators may also rename posts and threads if they are too generic or do not property reflect the content.

Moderators may move threads if they have been posted in the incorrect forum.

Threads/Posts questioning specific moderator decisions or actions (such as "why was a user banned?") are not allowed and will be removed.

The owners of Alpha Software Corporation (Forum Owner) reserve the right to remove, edit, move, or close any thread for any reason; or ban any forum member without notice, reason, or explanation.

Community members are encouraged to click the "Report Post" icon in the lower left of a given post if they feel the post is in violation of the rules. This will alert the Moderators to take a look.

Alpha Software Corporation may amend the guidelines from time to time and may also vary the procedures it sets out where appropriate in a particular case. Your agreement to comply with the guidelines will be deemed agreement to any changes to it.



Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

When you do post
First, make sure you are posting your question in the correct forum. For example, if you post an issue regarding Desktop applications on the Mobile & Browser Applications board , not only will your question not be seen by the appropriate audience, it may also be removed or relocated.

The more detail you provide about your problem or question, the more likely someone is to understand your request and be able to help. A sample database with a minimum of records (and its support files, zipped together) will make it much easier to diagnose issues with your application. Screen shots of error messages are especially helpful.

When explaining how to reproduce your problem, please be as detailed as possible. Describe every step, click-by-click and keypress-by-keypress. Otherwise when others try to duplicate your problem, they may do something slightly different and end up with different results.

A note about attachments
You may only attach one file to each message. Attachment file size is limited to 2MB. If you need to include several files, you may do so by zipping them into a single archive.

If you forgot to attach your files to your post, please do NOT create a new thread. Instead, reply to your original message and attach the file there.

When attaching screen shots, it is best to attach an image file (.BMP, .JPG, .GIF, .PNG, etc.) or a zip file of several images, as opposed to a Word document containing the screen shots. Because Word documents are prone to viruses, many message board users will not open your Word file, therefore limiting their ability to help you.

Similarly, if you are uploading a zipped archive, you should simply create a .ZIP file and not a self-extracting .EXE as many users will not run your EXE file.
See more
See less

CPU Usage

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    CPU Usage

    Hello,
    I am using WIN2000Pro and when A5 (4.5 266) is open my CPU usage goes to 100% for 5-10 seconds, then goes back down. Then a few seconds later it goes to 100% for 5-10 seconds and goes back down, and so on. A5 is merely open and not being used during this viewing and I'm not on a network where someone else may be accessing the file.

    I see this occuring when I open the task manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) and view the performance tab.

    I am assuming this is what is causing a slowdown in the other programs I use when A5 is open and minimized (and not being accessed), and is the reason for this post.

    Anyone have a similar problem, or have advice?

    Thanks in advance,

    Tony

    #2
    RE: CPU Usage

    Unfortunately this seems to be fundamental behavior of A5. The same behavior could be seen under Win NT, but Microsoft had a patch that addressed "errant" processor usage. Unfortunately there is no such patch for Windows 2000. It appears that the problem may be A5's use of a C function (Peekmessage) which hogs processor time. Selwyn has acknowledged this as a bug.

    Intel have a utility available on their web site (POWERMON.EXE) which I believe they developed to stop PeekMessage calls from causing excessive power consumption on laptops. It has a little button that allows you to selectively "fix" misbehaving applications. When it's applied to A5, you can see the processor usage drop immediately.

    This is a critical issue for anyone running (as we do) multiple instances of A5 on an ASP server. It drastically limits the number of instances of A5 that even the most powerful Windows 2000 Server can run simultaneously, such that we had to rebuild a bunch of Windows 2000 Servers on NT Terminal Services. Unfortunately this is an option that will soon not be available to us.

    We are hoping that this will be addressed soon.

    Finian
    Finian

    Comment


      #3
      RE: CPU Usage

      Yikes!!!!! anyone know if this will be fixed in Ver5?

      Russ

      Comment


        #4
        RE: CPU Usage

        Tony-Finian,

        I have written a dupe-checker that creates a match code from a cumulative expression compiled from user input. In short, the user chooses which field(s), parts of fields or expressions he or she wants to use, and then whether or not to do a literal or "fuzzy" (soundex) search for matches.

        Once the match code is created and then put into the match code field, I run a tbl.mark_duplicates() on it and, Bob's your uncle! However, there is a little trouble in Paradise.

        The match codes might look something like this: "|D324|3456|F5023|97023" (this would be for soundex on FIRST+LAST, the street number and a soundex on the street name, and finally the 5-digit ZIP. (I use the vertical bars to help delineate the match code segments.)

        Once these have been marked, I go in and create a "Dupe-Group" number for all the records in each dupe set; including the unmarked original and the marked duplicates.

        Finally, I select and sort the records with the dupe-group numbers and display them for the user to edit or change disposition.

        My point (at last!) is that while it has been working like a charm 99% of the time, once and awhile it veers off into outer space on an unknown vector. When this happens, after the dupe-group numbers have been added, the system simply "freezes." I can Task Manager out of it (Windows 2000 Pro), but can't figure out why it will do this on certain tables.

        When this happens, the CPU goes to a steady 100% usage and that's that. I wonder if it has something to do with this problem about which you guys have written here...

        Best regards,

        Geoff Hollander

        Comment


          #5
          RE: CPU Usage

          I've noticed this behavior for years. Normally, if another application, such as WMP, grabs 100% of processor, you simply stop doing what you were and go get a cup of coffee. Not so with A5. The process load is at or near 100% most of the time. If this was truly the case, we'd get nothing done. I tried the Intel Powermon utility and it did indeed reduce load to nearly zero. However, A5 was noticeably sluggish. I can only conclude that these measurements are erroneous and can be disregarded. I believe if A5 is grabbing many resources, it will show with the familiar hourglass.

          Tom Lyon

          Comment


            #6
            RE: CPU Usage

            Tom:

            I don't agree that the measurements are erroneous. We provide an ASP service to our clients in which multiple instances of A5 are run under Terminal Services and Citrix metaframe. The servers are high-end multi-processor machines from Dell usually with one gig of RAM.

            We have found that you can run many more instances of A5 under Windows NT Terminal Services than you can under Windows 2000 Terminal Services. The essential difference between NT and 2000 TS is that Microsoft created a patch for NT that addressed the problems associated with applications that use the processor "excessively". They have not and will not be doing that for Windows 2000. We have worked closely with Microsoft support engineers in debugging these problems and when they have looked at the system logs following server crashes (caused by running an additional instance of A5) they have highlighted A5's processor usage as the culprit.

            The significance of the Intel utility is that it works by intercepting a particular C method which is implicated in excessive processor usage. This is described in numerous MS tech notes about PeekMessage(). The fact that Powermon immediately reduces the measured processor usage of A5 is indicative that A5 is using PeekMessage in the manner described in the tech notes.

            I don't think the issue of processor usage is as critical on a standalone workstation or even on a machine on a peer-to-peer network that serves as both a files server and workstation with one or two other users in the network group. However, anyone who is contemplating setting up a WAN and looking to deploy applications in the manner we do will need to consider this issue very carefully. We are aware of other front ends (Access and Filemaker running under Win2K and Citrix) that, to the best of our knowledge, have no limitations due to processor usage.

            Finian
            Finian

            Comment


              #7
              RE: CPU Usage

              Hi - Do you know if this behavior exists on Win XP? It's killing me on WIN2000!

              Gary

              Comment

              Working...
              X