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Registered: March 14, 2007 | Reputation: | Posts: 4,678 |
| Posted: | | | | I'm finding Profiler really hard to work with because of memory allocation / deallocation. It may partly be because I have a large collection (5000+ profiles).
Here is what I experience:
When Profiler is "in full swing" so to say, it occupies around 200 MB of memory. But as soon as I switch to another program, it starts deallocating memory in small chunks, until it's down to just a couple of MB.
Then when I try to use it, it start reallocating memory, also in small chunks, and while it is doing this, the program is totally unresponsive. Getting up to something useful can take quite a long time, well over a minute. It's especially annoying because you get no indication of what the program is doing or how long it will take.
Does anyone else have the same problem? Does anyone know a way to avoid this? | | | My freeware tools for DVD Profiler users. Gunnar |
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Registered: March 14, 2007 | Reputation: | Posts: 6,744 |
| Posted: | | | | I sometimes notice that, too. Especially when I left DVDP running but haven't used it for a while and then return to it and try to use it.
My guess would be that it's the Delphi environment (the language in which DVDP was written) and its memory management that causes this. | | | Karsten DVD Collectors Online
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Registered: March 13, 2007 | Reputation: | Posts: 17,334 |
| Posted: | | | | Yeah... I see the same thing. And I also have up over 5,000 profiles (5,340 to be exact). But I haven't found anything other then giving it the time it needs to reallocate the memory.
In theory I guess you can close and reopen the program the several times a day I would be using it. But that takes pretty much the same amount of time if not a little more to do. | | | Pete |
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Registered: March 13, 2007 | Posts: 1,796 |
| Posted: | | | | The problem of memory space and its allocation has been the proverbial problem of stuffing 10 pounds of you know what in a 5 pound bag.
I have over 16,000 profiles and if I perform a function that requires scanning the whole db for something, well I might as well go get a cup of coffee.
When you see a computer in an old movie and the tapes are spinning back and forth those tapes are being used as an extension of memory. The UNIVAC I, my first computer only had 1K of memory.
There never is nor will there ever be enough memory. And even if you have a 64 bit PC and Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit operating system and many gigs of memory which I have, many programs are only programed to operating in 32 bit mode. The DVD Profiler is one. It would require two versions of the DVD Profiler, the current version and 64 bit version. Even with all that, if a program goes idle or other programs are running at the same time there will be a certain amount of swapping of data/programs to disc.
If you programming at the operating system level, it something you always have to be aware of. Example when I did the war games computer for USAF, SAC I had to worry about memory space. I had a number network and other computers feeding data. the data had to be written to disc and tape backup and a transaction processing system. One PhD in math who obliviously never did anything in real time, said oh just read a whole message into memory. I showed her that the message format could allow 256 bites per segment, 256 segment per page and 256 pages, that over 16M bites. I explained to her even if they say a message will never be that large, I told her, that is what the format allows and if somebody screws up and I don't plan for it the system crashes and I don't think you want to happen in time of a crisis when you're tracking missiles and planes. | | | We don't need stinkin' IMDB's errors, we make our own. Ineptocracy, You got to love it. "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." - Abraham Lincoln |
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Registered: March 13, 2007 | Reputation: | Posts: 3,197 |
| Posted: | | | | I haven't seen this behaviour since I switched to Windows 7 and upgraded my memory to 4 GB. My largest collection is around 4000 titles. | | | First registered: February 15, 2002 |
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Registered: March 13, 2007 | Reputation: | Posts: 5,494 |
| Posted: | | | | I have a modest collection of only 1400 titles ..( only the best titles for me..,as I'm very particular on what I want to add next ) and with that being said .: . Even If I leave profiler running in the background it too is very sluggish when I go to resume an operation... But when it is first 'fired up' it runs very fast and no problems with my memory resources.. ( 966 MB (1 GB) available/XP pro ) .. My trick is too get in find what I need or want to do- and when finished, shut Profiler down..
If I leave it open and running , a long time, it doesn't respond as well as it does primary ......... | | | In the 60's, People took Acid to make the world Weird. Now the World is weird and People take Prozac to make it Normal.
Terry | | | Last edited: by widescreenforever |
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Registered: March 13, 2007 | Reputation: | Posts: 2,293 |
| Posted: | | | | Quoting widescreenforever: Quote: I have a modest collection of only 1400 titles ..( only the best titles for me..,as I'm very particular on what I want to add next ) I do hope you're not saying that those with large collections are not being choosy about title selection FWIW I too see this, especially after letting DVDP run for a long time in the background... never found anything to do about it except be patient and it's been the case for all versions of Profiler I've ever run (I have 3700 titles or so in my Db, about 2200 owned and 1500 wishlist... though I confess some of those are there for reference not because I actually want to own them ) | | | It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong |
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Registered: March 14, 2007 | Reputation: | Posts: 4,678 |
| Posted: | | | | Quoting widescreenforever: Quote: My trick is too get in find what I need or want to do- and when finished, shut Profiler down..
If I leave it open and running , a long time, it doesn't respond as well as it does primary ......... That's pretty much my experience also, and it just seems silly that it should take longer to wake up an instance of Profiler that has been inactive than it takes to start it from scratch. | | | My freeware tools for DVD Profiler users. Gunnar |
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Registered: March 13, 2007 | Reputation: | Posts: 3,197 |
| Posted: | | | | Quoting Voltaire53: Quote: Quoting widescreenforever:
Quote: I have a modest collection of only 1400 titles ..( only the best titles for me..,as I'm very particular on what I want to add next )
I do hope you're not saying that those with large collections are not being choosy about title selection
I'm not particularly picky when it comes to buying movies, but FYI when I say collection, I mean number of profiles. This includes all child profiles and all titles in my wish list. So we're talking at least 25% dead flesh, but they still take up storage and memory. | | | First registered: February 15, 2002 | | | Last edited: by Nexus the Sixth |
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Registered: March 14, 2007 | Posts: 1,339 |
| Posted: | | | | I have never experienced any of these problems, however my collection is a bit smaller
1800 profiles
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit 8GB RAM
I actually just left profiler open all night long, does not appear to be sluggish at all, a quick look at task manager shows it only using about 200MB of memory. | | | -JoN |
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Registered: May 9, 2008 | Posts: 467 |
| Posted: | | | | It looks like it's just Windows Memory management trying to give active foreground applications priority. My main PC I see this if I switch and do other things . Majorly if switch to like Adobe for image editing even with 4GB and almost 5K profiles in DVDP. I also run DVDP on my development machine which has very little on it and 24Gb RAM and it never has this issue unless I run tests that eat almost all the memory. |
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Registered: June 3, 2007 | Posts: 706 |
| Posted: | | | | I wonder if giving the process a higher priority would help things a bit.
I am small taters, at only 850 ish profiles ( not really counting season DVD disccounts )
I get a slight pause when I go back to the app, but mine typically takes up about 178-500mb and this is with the headshot database loaded up.
-Robert |
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Registered: March 14, 2007 | Reputation: | Posts: 4,678 |
| Posted: | | | | Quoting tkinnen: Quote: It looks like it's just Windows Memory management trying to give active foreground applications priority. Could be, but I rather doubt it. I don't see any other apps like Firefox or Outlook that eat a lot of memory behaving like this. | | | My freeware tools for DVD Profiler users. Gunnar |
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| Blair | Resistance is Futile! |
Registered: October 30, 2008 | Posts: 1,249 |
| Posted: | | | | It's possible that it was designed this way to keep things from getting out of hand for people who run with less memory. | | | If at first you don't succeed, skydiving isn't for you.
He who MUST get the last word in on a pointless, endless argument doesn't win. It makes him the bigger jerk. |
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Registered: March 13, 2007 | Posts: 252 |
| Posted: | | | | Quoting RobAGD: Quote: I wonder if giving the process a higher priority would help things a bit. That's what I do when needing Profiler to be fairly responsive when switching back from another app. YMMV, but I find only the "Realtime" setting seems to reasonably preserve it's place in foreground memory - whether the cause is the OS or within Profiler. Might be more of an issue with XP memory management as I do see this on XP Pro & Home even with max 4GB installed and only a small task running other than Profiler, but don't have this issue on my ancient 2K system, and sounds like may not be present on 7? (don't have it running yet, just started building it.) One must also be cautious of an existing memory leak bug exacerbating things: don't open the "Change UPC" function and forget about it, lest you want to find out how sickly you system can get when short on memory! |
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Registered: March 14, 2007 | Reputation: | Posts: 4,678 |
| Posted: | | | | Late update:
It turns out that the answer to the question in the subject is that it really is a Windows problem. Sort of.
I use an application launcher called TurboLaunch. I like it because it keeps me from cluttering my desktop with a lot of icons.
For some reason, I ran into problems with one add-in when starting Profiler from TurboLaunch, but I found a work-around. I started it indirectly but adding it as a task in Windows Task Scheduler and adding a shortcut to the task scheduler in TurboLaunch. That worked fine. Or so I thought. And I forgot all about it.
But then one day I started Profiler from the start menu, and I didn't see these long delays. Some delays, yes, but not nearly as bad as before.
Now I kick myself for not thinking of testing this before. It just never occured to me that starting a program via the task scheduler would change the memory allocation characteristics. Go figure... | | | My freeware tools for DVD Profiler users. Gunnar |
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