How to find running process details? - windows-phone-8

i need to get the running process on windows phone 8. and also the details of each process like.
Memory usage
CPU usage
Running time
and what if i want to kill any process by user action
and also total used and free memory and CPU usage status
help required
regards

On Windows Phone, applications are sandboxed. You can get the amount of memory your own application uses, but that's about it. You can't get any kind of information about the other applications. Of course, it also means you can't kill them.
If you ever wondered why there isn't any task manager app on the marketplace, now you know.

Related

Why does the CPU load dropped in the last days?

Anybody has a hint? I didn't change anything in the machine (except for the security updates), and the sites hosted there didn't suffer a significant change in connections.
May be Google changed something in their infrastructure? Coincidentally, it was an issue with the Cloud DNS ManagedZone these days: they charged me with $ 920 for half month usage, and it was an error (they counted thousands of weeks of usage too) so they recently changed back to $ 0,28. May be there was some process that indeed used the Cloud DNS by error and thus consumed CPU power, and they corrected now?
I wish to know what is happening from someone that knows what going on in GC. Thank you.
CPU utilization reporting is now more accurate from a VM guest perspective as it doesn't include virtualization layer overhead anymore. It has nothing to do with Cloud DNS.
See this issue for some extra context:
https://code.google.com/p/google-compute-engine/issues/detail?id=281

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?

Windows Phone - Background Task - Broken at DataContractJsonSerializer.WriteObject

I am using Background Task in Windows Phone Mango. I need to send data to server using JSON format. But when DataContractJsonSerializer.WriteObject function is executed, nothing happens thereafter.
Has anyone experienced the same with Background Task in Windows Phone Mango?
It is possible that the operation is taking your app over the 6MB memory limit, and the phone is killing it.
You can run with the debugger attached: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.phone.scheduler.scheduledactionservice.launchfortest(v=vs.92).aspx
This will let you see what is happening. Also consider logging the amount of memory your app is using to see if you are approaching the limit: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.phone.info.devicestatus(v=vs.92).aspx
Be careful calling any type of serialization library (or any other library for that matter) as it will very quickly bump your memory usage over the 6MB limit, which will silently kill your agent with no errors.
Also note that on a real device your agent will typically start with 4-4.5 meg used already, significantly higher than on the emulator. That means all your code and the libraries it calls need to use less than 1.5 meg in a worst-case scenario.

Run my application in a simulated low memory, slow CPU environment

I want to stress-test my application this way, because it seems to be failing in some very old client machines.
At first I read a bit about QEmu and thought about hardware emulation, but it seems a long shot. I asked at superuser, but didn't get much feedback (yet).
So I'm turning to you guys... How do you this kind of testing?
I'm not sure about slowing a CPU but if you use a virtual machine, like VMWare, you can control how much RAM is actually used. I run it on a MBP at home with 8GB and my WinXP VM is capped at 1.5 GB RAM.
EDIT: I just checked my version of VMWare and I can control the number of cores it can use. It's definitely not the same as a slower CPU but it might highlight some issues for you.
Since it's not entirely clear that your app is failing because of the old hardware or the old OS, a VM client should allow you to test various versions of OSes rather quickly. It came in handy for me a few years back when I was trying to get a .Net 2.0 app to run on Win98 (it can be done though I don't remember how I got it working...).
Virtual Box is a free virtual machine similar to VMWare. It also has the capacity to reduce available memory. It can restrict how many CPUs are available, but not how fast those CPUs are.
Try cpulimit, most distro includes it (Ubuntu does) http://www.digipedia.pl/man/doc/view/cpulimit.1
If you want to lower the speed of your cpu you can easily do this by modifying a fork bomb program
int main(){
int x=0;
int limit = 10
while( x < limit ){
int pid = fork();
if( pid == 0 )
while( 1 ){}
else
x++;
}
}
This will slow down your computer quite quickly, you may want to change the limit variable to a higher number. I must warn you though this can be dangerous, because if implemented wrong you could fork bomb your system leaving it useless unless you restart it. Read this first if you don't understand what this code will do.
On POSIX (Unix) systems you can apply run limits to processes (that is, to executions of a program). The system call to do this is called setrlimit(), and most shells enable you to use the ulimit built-in to set them from the command-line (plain POSIX ulimit is not very useful). Using these you can run a program with low limits to simulate a smaller computer.
POSIX systems also provide a nice command for running a program at lower CPU priority, which can simulate a slower CPU if you also ensure there is another CPU intensive progam running at the same time.
I think it's pretty unlikely that cpu speed is going to exercise very many bugs; On the other hand, it's much more likely for different cpu features to matter. Many VM implementations provide ways of toggling on and off certain cpu features; qemu in particular permits a high level of control over what's available to the CPU.
Think outside the box. Which application of the ones you use regularly does this?
A debugger of course! But, how can you achieve such a behavior, to emulate a low cpu?
The secret to your question is asm _int 3. This is the assembly "pause me" command that is send from the attached debugger to the application you are debugging.
More about int 3 to this question.
You can use the code from this tool to pause/resume your process continuously. You can add an interval and make that tool pause your application for that amount of time.
The emulated-cpu-speed would be: (YourCPU/Interval) -0.00001% because of the signaling and other processes running on your machine, but it should do the trick.
About the low memory emulation:
You can create a wrapper class that allocates memory for the application and replace each allocation with call to this class. You would be able to set exactly the amount of memory your application can use before it fails to allocate more memory.
Something such as: MyClass* foo = AllocWrapper(new MyClass(arguments or whatever));
Then you can have the AllocWrapper allocating/deallocating memory for you.
On Linux, you can use ulimit as Raedwald said. On Windows, you can use the SetProcessWorkingSetSize system call. But these only set a limit on a per process basis. In reality, parts of the system will start to fail in a stressed environment. I would suggest using the Sysinternals' testlimit tool to stress the entire machine.
See https://serverfault.com/questions/36309/throttle-down-cpu-speed-of-vmware-image
were it is claimed free-as-in-beer VMware vSphere Hypervisor™ (ESXi) allows you to select the virtual CPU speed on top of setting the memory size of the virtual machine.

Reporting Services won't use more than 25% of CPU

I've set up a solution that creates rapid fire PDF reports. Currently it seems I can't get Reporting Services to use all the resources it has available to it. The system doesn't appear to be IO bound, CPU bound, or memory bound. Any suggestions on trying to figure out why it's running so?
The application isn't network IO bound, and it is multi-threaded to 2 times the number of processors.
SQL Server Reporting Services limits the number of reports run to 2 simultaneous ad-hoc reports and 2 simultaneous web reports. This is a hard limit imposed by the server.
Robin Day is probably right, however if you are using a processor that supports hyper threading you may get a performance benefit by turning this off in the BIOS. You can try an a A/B performance test.
You could also check the SQL instance (when you say reporting service you mean SSRS right?) has not a got processor affinity set.
Is this a case of not using a multi threaded approach? Is the machine using 100% of one core of a processor and that's the bottleneck?
EDIT: Sorry for stating the obvious, was just an idea before you mentioned that it was already multi threaded. I'm afraid I can't offer any more suggestions.
Any suggestions on trying to figure out why it's running so?
a) There's an API to restrict a whole process to one CPU: test that using GetProcessAffinityMask.
b) 'Thread state' and 'Thread wait reason' are two of the performance counters ... maybe you can read this to see why threads, we you think ought to be running, aren't.
All the threads of your application are fighting for a single lock. Use a profiler to see if there is a congestion somewhere.
If you have four cores, that would explain why you see 25% overall CPU usage.
Maybe the server can't deliver more data over the network (so it's network IO bound)?