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New UsageMonitor plugin

Changes made during the Rainmeter 4.2 beta cycle.
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jsmorley
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Re: New UsageMonitor plugin

Post by jsmorley »

These computers are not here to stay.

I can't disagree with you really. I'm not sure where Windows 10 is going. I'm not sure they know where Windows 10 is going. There are things I really like about it, and in my personal opinion it is a lot better than Windows 7, but there is a lot that I don't like. I never liked the aborted attempt to create a unified experience for desktop and tablet, and a great deal of the new stuff is just weird, unneeded, and unwanted in my view. Contona on a desktop, the entire Timeline and Sets stuff they are trying to get going now, and the strange, half-baked, stagger-step, poorly implemented move of settings into a single unified Settings app. Do it, do it right, do it once, or quit screwing with me.

I think Microsoft has lost its way with Windows. They have no vision for where they want to end up.

Having said that though, most of my complaints are about what they are doing on the user-facing end of things. Under the covers, Windows 10 is far, far superior to Windows 7. How it manages resources, and keeps things available but parked in memory and CPU is really good. For all the crap they have added, like Cortana and Action Center and such, it is still a much more efficient and reliable OS than Windows 7.

And you will pry the new Start Menu, with the really nice integrated search and easy to use "all programs" list and all that out of my cold, dead fingers. You can have your old-school Windows 7 start menu, and more power to you.
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fonpaolo
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Re: New UsageMonitor plugin

Post by fonpaolo »

jsmorley wrote:...
Having said that though, most of my complaints are about what they are doing on the user-facing end of things. Under the covers, Windows 10 is far, far superior to Windows 7. How it manages resources, and keeps things available but parked in memory and CPU is really good. For all the crap they have added, like Cortana and Action Center and such, it is still a much more efficient and reliable OS than Windows 7.
I agree with you, under the hood is much better, although I can still find some performance problems...

I use a dual boot, Win 7 Pro and Win 10 Pro: same hardware, different performance: Rainmeter
- in Win 7 it goes from 0,6 to 2% CPU;
- in Win 10 it goes from 1 to 3-4%.

Also tried the new UsageMonitor, very slight differences, but the overall performance is still high. :confused:
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jsmorley
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Re: New UsageMonitor plugin

Post by jsmorley »

fonpaolo wrote:I agree with you, under the hood is much better, although I can still find some performance problems...

I use a dual boot, Win 7 Pro and Win 10 Pro: same hardware, different performance: Rainmeter
- in Win 7 it goes from 0,6 to 2% CPU;
- in Win 10 it goes from 1 to 3-4%.

Also tried the new UsageMonitor, very slight differences, but the overall performance is still high. :confused:
The difference for me between UsageMonitor and PerfMon is dramatic. Not only CPU usage, which is a lot less, but the overall performance of Rainmeter, particularly with animations and such is much better. I mean, it's all relative, since going from my extensive Rainmeter setup using 1.1% to 0.6% is not going to make the newspapers, but better is better.

Make sure when you are evaluating that you don't have any skins still using PerfMon or AdvancedCPU still running. They really are just awful.

If the ONLY skin I am running is a single skin that either uses UsageMonitor or PerfMon to check resources used by Rainmeter itself, I get results like this:

With PerfMon:
1.jpg
With UsageMonitor:
2.jpg
RainmeterProcess_1.0.rmskin
(2.82 KiB) Downloaded 52 times
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jsmorley
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Re: New UsageMonitor plugin

Post by jsmorley »

Understand, that there are two components to how much better UsageMonitor is than PerfMon.

1) PerfMon is separately hitting the relatively expensive Performance Monitor routines once every update, and has to in effect start from scratch for each and every measure. UsageMonitor is checking the values once a second, but only once for ALL measures, in ALL skins you are running in Rainmeter.

2) PerfMon is effectively "blocking" Rainmeter when it updates the counter values. It is running in the same thread as the rest of Rainmeter, and everything has to "wait" while it does it's work. This is very noticeable with animations and AudioLevel visualizers and such. You get a small "jerky" effect. UsageMonitor runs in its own thread(s), and never has any impact on anything else going on in Rainmeter.
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fonpaolo
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Re: New UsageMonitor plugin

Post by fonpaolo »

I tested UsageMonitor and the performance result is similar to yours.

What I don't understand is why, using the same skins, with the same hardware, you'll have a different performance if used in Win 7 or Win 10.

I usually keep an eye to CPU time and Memory (working set), Win 10 uses at least 4 times the CPU resources of Win 7... :17what
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jsmorley
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Re: New UsageMonitor plugin

Post by jsmorley »

fonpaolo wrote:I tested UsageMonitor and the performance result is similar to yours.

What I don't understand is why, using the same skins, with the same hardware, you'll have a different performance if used in Win 7 or Win 10.

I usually keep an eye to CPU time and Memory (working set), Win 10 uses at least 4 times the CPU resources of Win 7... :17what
I don't know. I havn't run Windows 7 in a long time, and I'm sure the approaches to "tuning" your Windows for peak performance is vastly different between that and Windows 10. I keep my PC pretty tuned up, in fact I'm close to anal-retentive about it, but exactly how you do that is a complicated discussion that varies from person to person and system to system, and this probably isn't the best place for that.

For instance, I don't like Cortana either, so I just don't let it run at all. Not "hidden", "disabled". Cortana is still loaded and takes a small amount of memory, but I have tons of memory, and a few meg is nothing really. As far as I can tell, Cortana uses no CPU at all.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3109900/software/you-can-remove-cortana-from-windows-10-but-its-tricky.html
1.jpg
I run a pretty extensive set of Rainmeter skins, and with those running, and Firefox open, and Hexchat running, and HWiNFO running, and all the background stuff that the Windows OS is constantly doing, my CPU runs somewhere between 2-4%, with Rainmeter using about 0.6%. Doesn't cause any concern for me. I'm pretty happy with it.
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fonpaolo
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Re: New UsageMonitor plugin

Post by fonpaolo »

I must say that my Win 7 is optimized for the best performance and avoiding all the unwanted services.
With Win 10... I can see that at every update, most of the services I've disabled are now running, even if Microsoft says to keep the current settings, probably the ones they want.

And that's for 64 bit, if you use 32 bit systems there's a huge difference in performance, almost half of 64 bit...
But I know you may end up running both versions of a service, there.
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fonpaolo
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Re: New UsageMonitor plugin

Post by fonpaolo »

jsmorley wrote:For instance, I don't like Cortana either, so I just don't let it run at all. Not "hidden", "disabled". Cortana is still loaded and takes a small amount of memory, but I have tons of memory, and a few meg is nothing really. As far as I can tell, Cortana uses no CPU at all.
Well, wasting from 35 to 80 MB of RAM, even with 16 GB available, for me it's too much, considering that Cortana is only one of the useless features.
jsmorley wrote:I run a pretty extensive set of Rainmeter skins, and with those running, and Firefox open, and Hexchat running, and HWiNFO running, and all the background stuff that the Windows OS is constantly doing, my CPU runs somewhere between 2-4%, with Rainmeter using about 0.6%. Doesn't cause any concern for me. I'm pretty happy with it.
I'm not worried, but I prefer to limit the use of system resources as much as possible and as I said for me it's pretty high, since the only difference is OS.
Can I live with Rainmeter using up to 3% of CPU?
Yes.

However, using Win 7 my CPU is between 0 and 1%, resulting in a CPU usage of 1 minute per hour.
With Win 10, it's at least 4-5 minutes per hour.
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jsmorley
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Re: New UsageMonitor plugin

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Well, to each his own, but in my view, worrying about memory in Windows 10 is a pointless exercise. Windows 10 is just so good at managing memory, where anything that is not active will gladly give up memory if it is needed, and if it is not needed, who cares? Of what value is unused memory?
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fonpaolo
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Re: New UsageMonitor plugin

Post by fonpaolo »

jsmorley wrote:Well, to each his own, but in my view, worrying about memory in Windows 10 is a pointless exercise. Windows 10 is just so good at managing memory, where anything that is not active will gladly give up memory if it is needed, and if it is not needed, who cares? Of what value is unused memory?
Most of the applications I'm using are for 3D or photo editing, I can assure you that they need all the resources available. ;-)
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