

Greg from Xobni pontificates on memory managers - brezina
http://www.gregduffy.com/2007/11/14/memory-usage/

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tx
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.

~~~
brezina
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.

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

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halfwalker
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 ...

