Metro App BackgroundTask TimeTrigger/MaintenanceTrigger Usage - windows-runtime

I read an article on BackgroundTasks: TimeTrigger and MaintenaceTrigger.
Here they demonstrate how these triggers can be used to download email. I'm trying to understand the practicality and appropriateness of this approach.
Quotas for BackgroundTasks on LockScreen are 2 seconds CPU time and non-LockScreen is 1 second CPU time.
Given this restriction, how is it possible that one can download emails in this amount of time? Surely, just establishing a connection to the remote server will take more time than that?
Am i misunderstanding something about how BackgroundTasks work or is this article inaccurate?
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsappdev/archive/2012/05/24/being-productive-in-the-background-background-tasks.aspx

CPU Time is not the same as the amount of seconds that have passed. Your link references a Word Document, Introduction to Background Tasks, which contains the following:
CPU usage time refers to the amount of CPU time used by the app and not the wall clock time of the background task. For example, if the background task is waiting in its code for the remote server to respond, and it is not actually using the CPU, then the wait time is not counted against the CPU quota because the background task is not using the CPU.
If you are establishing a connection to the mail server (and waiting for it to respond), then you are not using any CPU. This means the time that you spent waiting is not counted against you.
Of course, you will want to test your background task to make sure that it stays within the limits.

Related

Chrome garbage collector going crazy

Using Version 48.0.2564.109 m.
We have a javascript web app (built with ExtJS). In Chrome, when we leave our app sitting there for a while, the GC starts going nuts. In Task Manager, you can see the CPU constantly spinning around 25%.
I took timeline snapshots and CPU profiles, and you can see the GC, about 10 times a seconds, try to collect memory, but collects 0B.
Our app is a large enterprise application and does use quite a bit of memory and updates the screen periodically.
But, there is absolutely no javascript code running during this time. So I can't see that it is something our app is actively doing
Does anyone know what could be triggering this?
It is killing performance of our app.
Also, it only happens when our tab is active. If you switch to a different tab, the CPU dies down and the GC stops.
Is there other data I need to collect to help determine this?
What is your app current JS heap size? You can check it by collecting timeline and enabling memory check box.
It looks like your app is close to the V8 memory limit, so V8 is trying to free some memory. If it is expected for the app to use that much memory, you can increase the limit on your host with something like: --js-flags="--max-old-space-size=2048"
Otherwise it might be just a memory leak in your code. Use heap profiler to hunt it down.

My Periodic Task just does not work

While attached to debugger it runs just fine. The Periodic Task is invoked and runs over and over, but when I deploy it to my device It seems to run 1-2 times and then stops.
What It does is setting the live tile background image from isolated storage. The images are created in the application and then saved to isolated storage. As mentioned it works well while attached to the debugger.
The only constraint I could think that could break it would be the memory cap. The application creates and saves 40 images of ~25kB each, and that isn't 1 MB! The application is maybe <4 MB, so that is 5 MB... a lot less than the 11 MB minimal requirement.
So it can't be the memory cap kicking in. Two consecutive unhandled crashes should also break the task, but I've thrown all the code in the task's OnInvoke() in a try/catch.
Now I'm out of ideas what stopping my periodic task when running without being connected to visual studio running in debugger. Any clues?
Firstly are you using Windows 8.1 phone by any chance? Since there is an issue with Periodic tasks do not run on windows phone 8.1 devices as you can see on this forum
Background agent can’t use more than 6MB of memory. You can get the current memory usage using the following snippet :
var memory = DeviceStatus.ApplicationMemoryUsageLimit
- DeviceStatus.ApplicationCurrentMemoryUsage;
automatically executed by the OS each 30 minutes
the operation can’t exceed 25 seconds per run
if the phone switch to battery saver mode the background agent may not be executed
on some devices only 6 background agents may be planned simultaneously
agents can’t use more that 6MB of memory
agents have to be re-planned each 2 weeks
an agent that crashes two times is automatically disabled by the system
Periodic tasks are unscheduled after two consecutive crashes. You need to make sure that this doesn't happen (check internet connectivity if required, set a timeout on web requests, etc.).
You should place your code in a try/catch block and log exceptions in the Isolated Storage to see what happened afterwards.
Here is the list of constraints that apply on scheduled agents (MSDN): Constraints for all Scheduled Task Types
Here is also a series of blog posts that could help you: Windows Phone: Background Agents Pitfalls
Have you actually measured and logged the memory that's being used? What you're saying isn't very correct:
When the background agent starts it has already taken 5-6MB to load what it needs from the .NET framework.
If you mean that the compressed files are 25KB each, you should know that the images in the memory are not compressed (at least not that much).
There are two things you can try:
Use this property and check the peak memory usage: DeviceStatus.ApplicationPeakMemoryUsage. Write it to some file (maybe every 5 images or so) and check if it's okay. Paste the results, please.
Note: When testing the memory usage, it's best to build the app in "Release" and run it without debugging on a device. That's most accurate. There are some minor variations, so you should run the agent several times to be sure it's working within the limits. You can force start it from the app using ScheduledActionService.LaunchForTest.
Also, I'd suggest you subscribe to the Application.Current.UnhandledException event and mark all exceptions as handled (and log them, so that you can fix them). That's for extra safety.
P.S. When the background agent stops executing, is it "blocked" in the list of background tasks on the device?

Knowing ressources taken by libgdx

I've made a game using libgdx. When I launch it, it takes ~30 Mo of RAM. But the memory taken in RAM keep expanding with time, whereas all of the textures are loaded.
Is there a way to know the ressources used by libgdx?
Yes there is. Start the jvisualvm.exe from your java sdk and connect to your running application. (Program/java/jdk_x_x/bin) It does show you the real RAM usage and the created classes and so on (See the Monitor tab).
Moreover you can profile with it to check if there are performance issues. It also can track the RAM usage. Check out the sampler tab for profiling. Simply start the sampler play a bit and shut down the game. After that it asks if you like to have a snapshot of the current status. Or just stop sampling and check the data. Take it and check than which of your stuff does take the most RAM and so on.
Else go for logging your Assetloading and check if you meight make misstakes.

Windows 8 WinRT background task time resolution

Can a WinRT background task triggered by a 15 min periodic timer start it's own thread, which then sleeps and wakes up every say 30 seconds? I.e. if you need a background task to do stuff more often than the minimum resolution, would this hack work? If battery life is not a concern...and would it would even when not on AC?
The background task can spawn a thread; BUT it may only use up to two CPU seconds per 15 minutes. In other words, you don't get permission to just run whatever thread work you'd like, you need to keep within constraints. The details are explained in the Introduction to Background Tasks document MS published:
An app on the lock screen receives a certain amount of CPU time at
regular intervals for its background tasks. If the app uses all of its
available CPU time, its background tasks are suspended until the app’s
CPU quota is replenished at the next generation for CPU quota updates.

How to measure current load of MySQL server?

How to measure current load of MySQL server? I know I can measure different things like CPU usage, RAM usage, disk IO etc but is there a generic load measure for example the server is at 40% load etc?
mysql> SHOW GLOBAL STATUS;
Found here.
The notion of "40% load" is not really well-defined. Your particular application may react differently to constraints on different resources. Applications will typically be bound by one of three factors: available (physical) memory, available CPU time, and disk IO.
On Linux (or possibly other *NIX) systems, you can get a snapshot of these with vmstat, or iostat (which provides more detail on disk IO).
However, to connect these to "40% load", you need to understand your database's performance characteristics under typical load. The best way to do this is to test with typical queries under varying amounts of load, until you observe response times increasing dramatically (this will mean you've hit a bottleneck in memory, CPU, or disk). This load should be considered your critical level, which you do not want to exceed.
is there a generic load measure for example the server is at 40% load ?
Yes! there is:
SELECT LOAD_FILE("/proc/loadavg")
Works on a linux machine. It displays the system load averages for the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes.
System load averages is the average number of processes that are either in a runnable or uninterruptable state. A process in a runnable state is either using the CPU or waiting to use the CPU.
A process in uninterruptable state is waiting for some I/O access, eg waiting for disk. The averages are taken over the three time intervals. Load averages are not normalized for the number of
CPUs in a system, so a load average of 1 means a single CPU system is loaded all the time while on a 4 CPU system it means it was idle 75% of the time.
So if you want to normalize you need to count de number of cpu's also.
you can do that too with
SELECT LOAD_FILE("/proc/cpuinfo")
see also 'man proc'
with top or htop you can follow the usage in Linux realtime
On linux based systems the standard check is usually uptime, a load index is returned according to metrics described here.
aside from all the good answers on this page (SHOW GLOBAL STATUS, VMSTAT, TOP...) there is also a very simple to use tool written by Jeremy Zawodny, it is perfect for non-admin users. It is called "mytop". more info # http://jeremy.zawodny.com/mysql/mytop/
Hi friend as per my research we have some command like
MYTOP: open source program written using PERL language
MTOP: also an open source program written on PERL, It works same as MYTOP but it monitors the queries which are taking longer time and kills them after specific time.
Link for details of above command