Greg from Xobni pontificates on memory managers | Hacker News Reader

Greg from Xobni pontificates on memory managers

gregduffy.com

15 pointsbrezina7 comments

Funny, but I uninstalled Xobni precisely because it decided to run its own little daemon at all times. Initially I liked the product a lot and several guys at work installed it because of me not shutting up on "look! all attachments from you in the corner, see?!"

What he's talking about is a valid concern. I too, having implemented an RSS reader with background polling process, had to deal with users complaining about "big" number in Task Manager.

However, what I learned later on, was that it isn't the number in task manager that people dislike, it is the assumption that we, engineers, make about how they use their computers. Our applications (my RSS reader or Xobni's analytics) may be useful, but not useful enough to be running at all times. An average user probably does about a hundred things he considers useful with his PC on a typical day, and if each and single one of those things starts its own little "monitor", things may get nasty.

It should not be so hard to keep in mind that our code is not the only thing on a computer, and using our software is not users' full time job.

Ever saw a 3 year old laptop that belongs to a "typical" user? Task manger has a scrollbar four (!) pages tall. That's how many processes he's running. Sure, every single one of them is written by a guy who knows the difference between private working set and shared memory, and every single one is somewhat useful (anti-virus, volume controls, sound enhancers, CD silencers, download managers, RSS daemon, weather bugs, temperature monitors, etc). But in the end, you DO end up with sluggish performance and ridiculous startup times. And Vista only amplifies the pain.

Therefore, unless you are a driver or a shell of some sort, DO NOT run any code in the background. Ever.

This is why I am not a Xobni user anymore. Kudos to them for a great idea and usable implementation.

Sad. I want you back as a user tx. My goal is obviously to make the product so much a part of your email life that it is painful to uninstall. I bet you are like me and use email all day long. I hate Outlook without Xobni. I would hope Xobni would have its place above temperature monitors, weather bugs, download managers, etc on your machine too.

Our separate proces is super small and simply allows us to do automatic updates, nothing else.

What is your strategy for secure automated updates? I have a desktop app in development that I will probably need to do that for.

"Pontificate" -- I Do Not Think It Means, What You Think It Means.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=pontificate

> Sure, every single one of them is written by a guy who knows the difference between private working set and shared memory ...

I think this is a pretty big assumption. Anybody can create a Windows service in visual studio in about 3 clicks.

Also, these other services may hook things in Windows, hold on to a bunch of handles, constantly poll for things, etc. We really try to be well-behaved in XobniService. It uses a single thread, sleeps the majority (about 99.96%) of the time, has few private bytes, and will probably be swapped out to disk most of the time (unless nothing else needs the memory). So XobniService has virtually nil impact on performance, besides an extra entry in task manager.

If Windows had a workable cron implementation, I'd just have used that.

I'm thinking about removing it anyway, despite the low impact on performance, since user perception is obviously important. I've been thinking of some workable alternatives, but they don't provide as nice an update experience.

If it's really the only thing keeping you away, you can Start/Run 'sc delete XobniService' and the Outlook plugin will still work just fine. You may not receive future updates this way, though.

Thanks for the feedback, hope you come back to us :)

I think you should know by now that you won't have any issues gaining and retaining users: I have witnessed your success around in my office and I am seeing your red-orange color scheme on my colleagues' monitors all day. And most of them don't care for a little and, I have no doubt, efficient background process.

Keep up the good work. :-)

Hrm. I wouldn't call the xobniservice "small" ... I installed Xobni last week to check out, even though I'm a Thunderbird user. I do have Office 2003 on the laptop and dip into Outlook occasionally.

Without Outlook running, xobniservice was using 14meg ...

Why not just have it kick off when Outlook starts up, and exit with Outlook exits ?

BTW, this is probably something that would make me move from TB back to Outlook. I really really really hope you can do a TB version ...

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