FeedBeast™ Online

Since you were so kind to respond to my suggestion before, I wanted to ask a question about the startup lag time of the application. I have been developing for a long time so I guess that's why I noticed but the application takes an incredibly long time to load and when you bring it out of systray it takes a long time to paint the interface. Are you aware of this? and is there any plans to streamline the controls and the interface so it doesn't take so long to paint and freeze while its doing it. Almost like it doesn't "DOEVENTS" while its loading and trying to start things. Especially when you click on a post and it loads the tab below to show it to you, it takes a LONG time and I have a high speed connection T1+ so its not the web load time. Anyway, you have a great software and I wanted to contribute to make it better if I can.

Startup time is something I plan to optimize just before release, when everything is implemented and working properly. When launching FeedBeast for the first time, it has to load the .NET framework and initialize lots of libraries, which unfortunately takes a long time and is completely beyond my control. However there are certain things I can do to improve startup time (like delayed initialization) that I will try to implement towards release.

That said, I've not noticed any significant lag in opening it from the system tray after it has already been running. Could you elaborate on what exactly the problem is? If FeedBeast hasn't been used in a while and has been dumped to the page file, it will take some time to "warm up" again, but this is completely normal behavior for any application.

Certainly the interface should not stall while loading a web page, but it has been known to happen due to IE stealing all of the CPU to perform something (I am about as thrilled about this as you are, but it's not my domain).

If you can point out some specific areas that are consistently slow I will look into them during the optimization phase prior to launch.

Thanks for the note.

Logan
 

I used WinPatrol which is freeware and it helps to delay start specific applications that comsume CPU load.

You can move FeedBeast.exe from "Startup Programs" to "Delayed Start" and add it to delay by 2 or 3 minutes. It will start up Windows quickly and it will load FeedBeast 3 minutes later after Windows started.

 It is really good tool.  you can find it at www.winpatrol.com 

 Logan, I am sorry but this forum software SUCKS! I redid this post 3 times and each time it showed fine in preview and display and when it posted, it got all mush. I am done trying to fix it.

427 megabytes!! Something has to be wrong with that. I've never seen FeedBeast use more than say 60 under full load, and usually much less. Do you by any chance have a ton of tabs open? Tabs are what take up the most memory when running FeedBeast, because they keep the entire web page in memory. In 1.6 you will be able to unload tabs to free up memory, which might help.

At any rate I think this is the problem. When FeedBeast minimizes to the task bar or tray icon, it unloads its active memory (by means of a standard system call) to free up memory for other programs. When the window is restored, the OS has to load all that data back into memory, and thus if you are using 427 megs, that's going to take a noticable amount of time to do. It makes total sense now why you are experiencing this.

However, I'd like to figure out exactly why FeedBeast is using so much memory on your system. If it's a memory leak, then I have to fix that. Do you experience the same problem if you quit and restart FeedBeast, or do you tend to run the program for extended periods of time (by this I mean do you keep your computer running 24/7 and rarely quit FeedBeast?) and accumulate a lot of open tabs?

Logan

P.S.
I'm aware the forum software sucks, though I wasn't at the time I chose it. I plan to move to some better software in the future, but right now getting 1.6 released is the prime focus.

Ok, "never" is an exaggeration, but it should not usually exceed 60-80 megs while active. I've certainly never seen it close to 427.

I do not have any tabs open, this is when its trying to paint itself on the screen. I avoid opening tabs because that's another story of how LONG and hard it takes for the tabs to load. The whole IE control/instance is ridiculously inefficient. I have a really busy schedule or before I contacted you I would have done a full memory leak/benchmark test with proof of the performance when I wrote you. If there is anything you need to help you debug it, let me know but I am coming to you in support of your software. I have seen too many good programs/concepts disappear for poor communication and attempts to fix and I don't want to see that happen here. It has promise and I don't want to be one of those who hits a block and walks away. I am sorry about the forum comment, I was frustrated and I figured you already know :) 

If there are any tips or tools you can suggest, I'd be happy to hear them. I've fiddled around with some free profiling tools in the past, but they've always been a pain in the butt, if they ended up working at all.

I really cannot imagine how FeedBeast could be using 427 megabytes of RAM without even any tabs open, but I will give it some thought. I will say tho that the current architecture is about at its limit, and I plan a complete architectural rewrite for version 2.0. Frankly 1.6 was meant to be a feature-addition improvement to the 1.5 engine (most of which is still left over from 1.0 back when I didn't really know what I was doing, lol). As such I don't plan to invest any great deal of time hacking and prodding the 1.x kernel too much. If there are some serious concerns I will take a look at those areas, but most of the future effort in this area will be spent on the kernel rewrite.

One area I might work on to improve this is the article loading. Originally, FeedBeast would load the entire database into memory, but this was awful for memory efficiency and startup time that I changed it to loading only one feed at a time. While this improved things considerably, it's still not a very good design, because if a single feed is very large it will still use up a lot of memory. During development of 1.5 and the system tray menu interface, I developed a way that articles could be loaded on-demand. It turned out this was very quick, and I figured I could use the same idea to improve the article-loading on a per-feed basis, rather than loading an entire feed's articles into memory. This sort of on-demand loading will more than likely be a big part of the 2.0 engine, which will hopefully result in quicker load times and a dramatically reduced memory footprint.

I am sending this to our guys in R&D and QA and have them run it in mulitple environment clients and see how they react side by side. Then the AA and AE can look at it and decide what is causing it. It could be memory, it could be a process, thread failures, system clock speed, refresh rate and etc etc. I will share with you everything we find out and make recommendations if you'll have them.

In the meantime, I fully understand and feel for your need to prioritize your energy and to focus on the problems at hand and deal with the rest at a later time. By then your understanding of things might increase, lighting might strike twice and you think of a whole different approach and whatever can come later. Best of luck to everything and I will be in touch with the rest. 

Wow that's great of you! I will definitely listen to anything you come up with. While being a one-man company is great in that I get the final word, the hardest part of course is that I have to learn how to do everything myself, and to do it well. While I consider FeedBeast pretty great in terms of UI and usability, there are a lot of tricks of the trade concerning the lower-level areas like performance and memory common to all applications that I haven't fully mastered yet.

Perseverance will improve this over time, but I'm more than delighted to have a little help on the way. Your willingness to help and faith in the project (and thus me as a developer!) is truly appreciated. It's a lot of work at times, but I've already made great strides and things are still very, very young.

Logan 

 No problem, consider it my contribution. I know how it is to be a one man shop, I was that for more than 7 years and only the recent years has it become so established that I can sit back once in a while and let others do it. It will come with time and as you said already, you persevere and you will be fine. Mastery is not a race, its a journey and you are well on your way.

Thanks, that means a lot. It's been a pretty rough day.

 No problem. I wish I could say otherwise but there will be many more hard days like this. Only thing you can do is go home, take a load off and try to hit tomorrow harder than it hits you. I think I am going to take my own advice and head home too. Take care.