[eidenk]

The thing is, Tihiy, that RP9 does install and uninstall, but when it is installed it does not seem to work, I mean I can't load a skin for example. Skins are listed (but I don't think displayed properly) in the config panel but selecting one and clicking apply or OK yelds nothing. Same goes for everything else I tried. So I was not sure it was working at all, including your User and GDI optimizations.

And I am not sure I understand why no change in the resource usage is the best you could expect as dencorso seem to have positive results. Maybe you've understood it as my resource usage remaining constant after some use of the OS. If so that's not the case. RP9 is installed but everything seems to behave as if it wasn't there. Maybe that's all off topic here and I should post it in the in the RP9 thread.

As for reviving the GDI expander you had worked on, I think it is certainly a good idea but perhaps without an equivalent User expander it does not make too much sense, as it's the User resources that seem to always be depleted the most here.

You know better anyway if you want to spend time and efforts on that or not. If it's lot of work for at best very little expected results, then there is perhaps no point in it.

I'd be just glad right now if I could get the same boon as dencorso does.

[dencorso]

eidenk, on Mar 28 2009, 12:38 PM, said:

I have tried full install and also minimal install and there is no visible difference that I can see.

But RP9 as a whole does not seem to work at all here I must say.

Maybe that's because I am using Windows ME

AFAI had understood, RP9 ought to work equally well on 98SE and ME.
BTW, what's the difference between full and minimal? What doesn't get installed in minimal?

[Sfor]

Tihiy, on Mar 28 2009, 07:58 PM, said:

But it won't help in other cases. It won't give you power to open myriad of apps.
So is it worth it? Tell me scenarios you lack resources in.

I've got two scenarios, of the critical system resource depletion.

1) The bad flash web contents code does allocate more and more system resources. The same web pages are causing resource depletion on many different browsers. The best defence is to lock the URL the fault causing flash contents is comming from.

2) A faulty application has some sort of a resource draining bug in the report manager function. Every time a certain reports are being created 2-5% of system resources are being locked in Windows 98. However, there are no problem in Windows 2000. I'm suspecting the report manager function has it's own resource table assigned. So, every time it is oppened a new resource table is created. The application manufacturer does not want to deal with this kind of a problem, as they do not want to accept any bug reports with just the Windows 98 in them. The only bug I can report in Windows 2000 is a small memory leak (less than a 100kB locked with every report manager session).

It is enough to run the report manager about 10 times on Windows 98 to get the system unstable, or locked. Appart from the resource leak it does allocate over 40% of the system resources when working, as well. On the other hand, on Windows 2000 the application worked correctly after 500 iterations of the report manager sessions. The only side effect was about 50MB of memory being locked.

In the end all I can do is to tell to the Windows 98 users to close the application after every few reports.

So, in my case, the ability to displace the forgotten resource entries to some other table, would significantly increase the Windows 98 stability.

This post has been edited by Sfor: 29 March 2009 - 02:09 AM

[Drugwash]

I guess browsers are generally resource-hungry. In my case, it's SlimBrowser that eats up a lot of resources with each open page and it won't free them when a page (tab) is closed; possibly not freeing all allocated resources even when closed.

Another one for me is the official eMule, which - when open - only allows me either Miranda or SlimBrowser, but not both.

Most likely off-topic, but since I'm here, I'd like to ask if there's anybody else getting "Error: not enough memory" in Nero 7.0.0.0 when trying to burn a DVD (haven't tried CDs) with 512MB of RAM. This is because Nero used to work fine with only 256MB and coincidentally (or not) it started throwing such error right after me upgrading the RAM to 512MB. It does work fine despite that error, but it's annoying having to confirm the message box on each burn.

Tihiy, I'll contact you sometime these days about this GDI heap topic.

This post has been edited by Drugwash: 29 March 2009 - 05:44 AM

[dencorso]

Drugwash, on Mar 29 2009, 08:42 AM, said:

Most likely off-topic, but since I'm here, I'd like to ask if there's anybody else getting "Error: not enough memory" in Nero 7.0.0.0 when trying to burn a DVD (haven't tried CDs) with 512MB of RAM. This is because Nero used to work fine with only 256MB and coincidentally (or not) it started throwing such error right after me upgrading the RAM to 512MB. It does work fine despite that error, but it's annoying having to confirm the message box on each burn.

I never heard of such an error before. But, why not get back to 256 MiB temporarily, just to test whether more RAM is the origin of the problem?

[Tihiy]

I'm pleased to announce that future Revolutions Pack 9 version will include technology which will greatly reduce USER resource usage in common scenarios. After your reports and my research i found a big hole in USER heap which i'm able to plug.

Hole I found is in the design of list and combo box controls built in USER subsystem which consume a lot of space in 64K heap. The issue is so bad that any application that uses list/combo boxes makes easily noticeable impact. Less than 300 combobox windows can be created on pure system (while global windows limit should be 16000).

To solve this issue, combo and list boxes had to be completely rewritten. That was hard task (on which i worked on for long time), but it's near finishing. 'Beta' version is kinda ready, but there are known compatibility problems and RP9 re-architecting tasks to be done.

Test numbers:
My unscientific 'Load 3 ImgBurn copies' test shows 65% USER free up from 39%.
If you're interested in your scenario, i'm ready to test it.

[slhk]

Tihiy, on May 16 2009, 05:58 AM, said:

I'm pleased to announce that future Revolutions Pack 9 version will include technology which will greatly reduce USER resource usage in common scenarios. After your reports and my research i found a big hole in USER heap which i'm able to plug.

Is it the "long-secret feature" you mentioned in the RP9 thread?

Will it benefit all programs or just certain kind of programs?

This post has been edited by slhk: 15 May 2009 - 11:16 PM

[Tihiy]

Quote

Is it the "long-secret feature" you mentioned in the RP9 thread?

Yes.

Quote

Will it benefit all programs or just certain kind of programs?

Most GUI programs.

[slhk]

Tihiy, on May 16 2009, 09:48 PM, said:

Quote

Will it benefit all programs or just certain kind of programs?

Most GUI programs.

How about web browsers?

[Tihiy]

Quote

How about web browsers?

IE - based ones, for sure. Unlikely for others. Is there browsing scenario which eats a lot of USER (except opening lots and lots of pages)?

[slhk]

Tihiy, on May 16 2009, 11:22 PM, said:

Quote

How about web browsers?

IE - based ones, for sure. Unlikely for others. Is there browsing scenario which eats a lot of USER (except opening lots and lots of pages)?

Firefox3 crashed easily after browsing alibaba.com for a while

Shall try IE when your new technology is launched, though I still prefer to use non-IE based browser

[dencorso]

Tihiy, on May 15 2009, 06:58 PM, said:

I'm pleased to announce that future Revolutions Pack 9 version will include technology which will greatly reduce USER resource usage in common scenarios. After your reports and my research i found a big hole in USER heap which i'm able to plug.

Way to go, Tihiy! I shall test it as soon as you release it!

[eidenk]

Hi, as i mentioned to dencorso by PM some time ago, I could not install RP9 properly because it turned out my registry was damaged since a couple of months.

Since this has been repaired I have now been using minimal install of RP9 since a few weeks and it seems stable enough here. There seem to be a little benefit with the resource usage but they end up getting depleted anyway. Perhaps your new fix will make this better.

Anyway, the point of this post is asking you tihiy whether there is a possibility you could release this resource optimizer as a standalone dll who could be installed without installing the rest of RP9.

I am guessing you got into doing such an optimizer to offset the cost of RP9 in resources and I am imagining that if RP9 wasn't there along the optimizer I would see an increase in free resource on fresh boot of perhaps 10% instead of 1 or 2%.

[Drugwash]

Tihiy, on May 16 2009, 06:22 PM, said:

Quote

How about web browsers?

IE - based ones, for sure. Unlikely for others. Is there browsing scenario which eats a lot of USER (except opening lots and lots of pages)?

SlimBrowser eats about 30-40% of resources, sometimes more. It does release most of them (save for 2-3% maybe) but only on exit, not on page close.
I could test your "baby" here since SB is open about all the time.

[Tihiy]

eidenk, unless you use window skin, there is no differences in resource usage - since i know how to not use resources. You may want to cut RP9.1 into bare-bone by using only RP8.dll (deleting shl8.dll, uberhack.exe), but note, i'm about to change component dependencies.

[eidenk]

Thanks for the headup Tihiy. I was only wondering because I saw all the stuff there is in the ctrl-alt-del panel, the quite big bitmap notably, but if you say it's all optimized, no worries. I'll try without the other dlls and see how it fares. Looking forward trying the new RP9 with the new User optimizations.

[M()zart]

Tihiy, on Mar 28 2009, 12:58 PM, said:

So is it worth it? Tell me scenarios you lack resources in.

May be its a bit too late for this but I tell you my two scenarios.

The first one is with SolSuite 2008. It is still compatible with Windows 98 (and 2009 also), but it eats VERY many GDI resources, more than 30% - 35 or even 50, though it releases them when closed. And I often browse with firefox and playing SolSuite simultaneously, because with my dial-up and disconnects every 2 minutes browsing is for patient people . And I sometimes lack GDI resources.

The other scenario is playing Worms 2 portable. The game eats more GDI resources each time I start new match and does not release them, even after closing it, even with your RP 9.1. So if I try to play more than 3 - 4 matches without rebooting Windows crashes.

Couple of times I also had to press reset due to insufficient USER resources, even your kernel task manager was unable to help, but I cannot give you typical scenario. It seems that it was long uptime, active browsing with firefox and/or Opera.

My Evolve screensaver also eats 1-3 % of resources each time it works and does not release them, but it is not so big loss. Other apps behave well and release their resources, may be because of your RP.

[dencorso]

In posts #2, 3 and 4 I had reproduced, as quotations, the now lost, original resources thread, from what I had saved myself. All posts between Oct 19 2007 and Nov 20 2007 were then lost. Now, thanks to RetroOS, who sent me a copy of the part I was missing, I have been able to complete the recovery of the original thread. So, now, the quoted thread in posts #2, 3 and 4 is complete. Thanks a whole lot, RetroOS! You do rock!

[Tihiy]

Not fair to spoil exectations, but i'm here again with some news.

New USER salvation is delayed due to my work on KernelEx 4 (finally) as well as other busy things.

The news, i've figured out how to theoretically implement GDI heap expander without breaking compatibility, performance and memory usage. This includes a lot of things to hax: global memory manager, local heap handle manager and GDI insides, but seems possible unless I bump into hard compatibility problems.

But theoretically, it can be very-very promising; i won't spoil numbers.

Or did rloew already implemented one?

[dencorso]

Way to go, Tihiy!!!