Xara idle activity

[willdean]

One for the Xara people:

Just looking around my machine at apps which are consuming CPU when they're idle, and Xara Xtreme (3.2.4.3017 on Vista) appears to be one of them.

Of the four threads, one of them is polling all the time (200-ish switches a second), even when the app is minimised.

Any chance of getting this fixed at some future upgrade? Not a big deal, but windows apps should all try and play nicely together, and constant low-grade cache-washing by backgrounded apps isn't nice play. (There are many rougher children in the playground though, I'll certainly give you that!)

I can supply stacks, etc, if that helps.

Thanks,

Will

[steve.ledger]

Hi willdean..
Forgive me for asking, but I'm curious as to why you leave many applications running (abeit idle and minimised) when not in use?
On my rig, XaraXtreme opens in 4 seconds, so for me at least, opening Xara only when I need it is no problem.

While on the subject, and as you probably already know, there are those who become quite worried when they view the Process list (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) and see 'System Idle Process' at 98 -99% in the CPU column. I've known people to reformat and re install Windows fearing they have some CPU gobbling virus on their machine. Of course 98% is referring to the percentage of time the CPU is 'idle' rather than usage.

[willdean]

I suppose the answer is 'because I can' - I tend to work on lots of projects at once, and it's convenient to have all the tools I use running at the same time.

Xara tends to be a tiny proportion of what I do, and it's just nice not to have to to restart it and reload a file each time I make a mod.

I actually write software for a living, and I have been frequently guilty of writing apps which poll more than they need to, chiefly because I'm lazy, and it's often easier to poll than it is to think of a cleverer way to solve a problem. Were a customer to come along and ask me not to make an interactive app poll, 99 times out of 100 I'd be able to improve things, and certainly for the cases where an app is minimised.

There are two unstoppable trends in desktop computers which are relevant here:
1. They run more and more processes at once
2. They have deeper and deeper memory cacheing architectures, where cache misses are more and more expensive relative to the core performance.

I think it's as important as it's ever been for apps to behave well with regard to sharing a machine - and I'm sure a company which cares about perf as much as Xara does will appreciate that.