online trace facility

[tomyrush]

I notice at rather random times, FF is almost impossible to wake up, and other apps such as excel, Quicken, outlook and others are extremely slow to load.

By the time I can alt:ctl:del (or maybe because I do that) everything has settled down and "system-idle-process is back at 99%.

I have scaled back my AdBloc Plus filters and for a while that seemed to make FF happy, but not always. I get very annoyed and when a slowdown happens with FF. It Is not unusual to wind up with 2 or 3 instances of my home page.

I am an old main frame guy and we had trace facilities that kept track of execution times, etc. They were very helpful in defining and fixing bottlenecks. I think what I am looking for is set of snapshots of the task mgr at various time intervals, to see what is happening. I am pretty sure that my box is fast enough and I have enough ram to run for several seconds when tings slow down.

Does any one know of a performance monitor similar to this for XP-3?

Tom

[HansV]

Does How to create a log using System Monitor in Windows help?

[JoeP]

If the hangs are random events you need to have Task Manager or something else running from the time you boot.

You can use Process Explorer. It is like Task Manager on steoids.

Also, see Process Monitor.

Joe

[BobH]

Thought I was the only old mainframer here.

I don't know of such a tool for the PC but would like to know if you find one. About 15 years ago, I was working with a bunch of PC app developers (on much smaller systems) and we looked for tools unsuccessfully. I would think that there would be a market for such for developers but they might be too pricey for a clueless guy like me.

FWIW, when I've had stalls like that in FF it has always been my AV software that caused it. I used to run both AVG and Avast. I found AVG had grown too large for me and dropped it. I now have delays only at startup but rarely while pages are loading unless I'm on a very popular commercial page with lots of ads and videos, etc. Some sites are worse than others.

[tomyrush]

Thanks guys - needless to say, it will take a while to play with and get used to. I will start setting everything up see what I can find out.

It just is irritating that I can't add hundreds of applications on a 5 year old box and have it run like brand new. !!!

I did notice a significant improvement in ff activation after I went thru all of the adbloc plus filters and deleted everything with less than 50 hits - I also tailored and combined some of the ABP filters.

In response to Bob's comment - I dropped AVG earlier this year after running several tests - some of their options (don't remember exactly which ones) - were killing my box. At Hans suggestion, I went to Microsoft Security Essentials and it has worked wonderfully, without bogging things down.

Thanks again
Tom

[DaveA]

It just is irritating that I can't add hundreds of applications on a 5 year old box and have it run like brand new. !!!

A new machine will NOT have 500 applications installed, I would not expect any machine with 500 applications installed like a new empty machine would.

[tomyrush]

I'm not sure where you saw 500 applications. My comment was made in jest