Hi,

I have to start by saying I love the product so far.  The news ticker is a great alternative to constantly refreshing an RSS reader.

However, are there any plans to offer configuration to throttle the amount of CPU time consumed?  I run the news ticker all throughout the day, and I find that more often than not, Particls.exe is consuming as much CPU time as possible, sometimes up to 100% for extended periods of time.  This makes it rather difficult to keep "multitasking" at work

Good point Jbiz.

I think they need work here too.  

yeah, it can get a bit heavy sometimes

but that's probably only tweaking required.

Hi Jbiz - We have found that Particls typically only goes into that '100%' mode when Norton is installed - do you have it installed?

Otherwise it should stay under 5% and go up towards 20-30% only while doing a feed refresh or profiling your attention data (about once an hour)

I don't have Norton installed and I am also seeing Particls using all available CPU time

Nah, no Norton.  We use Trend OfficeScan though.  How do you control the feed refresh interval?  The "AdapterRefreshInterval" setting under "Settings and Skins"?

If i view the settings/options window, I see "5d 15h saved.  82524 of 152277 items outputted".  Is that a lot?  I do have a lot of feeds.

Prior to starting this post, I had Particls stopped and 95% of my CPU was idle.  I then started it up, and have been at 100% utillization throughout the duration of this post.

(this is a 3.4ghz p4 with 2GB of RAM).

Here's a dropoff after exiting, after I finished that post...

Hey guys - We are looking into this now - it was a problem a long time ago but we have since fixed it -  but it has come back from somewhere

Sweet, thanks Chris!

Ok we have some ideas for improving performance of bandiwdth, favicons and CPU/Memory all ine one go - sounds too good to be true! So we will see how it goes - will do an auto-update in a few days

I'm happy to report that the latest update is the first version of Particls that has not insisted on the full remainder of my CPU usage.

Eeegsellent

Nice one guys. Awesome improvement.

Thanks Richard more to come soon

Ciao.Great application, Particls.

Note: With News Ticker enabled ma CPU usage is towards 25% and my laptop's (Pentium 1.70GHz, 768 Mb RAM) temperature grow up... ok, my computer is two years old but...Without News Ticker CPU usage is 6/8%. Are some sets to try reduce this problem? 

Thanks 

Hi Federico - can u try upgrading to the latest version of Particls (which has the new sidebar) and let us know how it goes

You can do it by going to "Options and Status" window - Clicking on "Settings and Skins" and changing the property "AutoUpdate Type" to "ExperimentalBuilds"

and clicking yes when prompted about a new version

now I use new "experimental" version.

Two tests:

1) 

News Ticker: Disabled
Sidebar: Enabled / Only importants items
Peebles: Disabled
Pop-Up: Enabled / Only very importants items

Medium Level of Interruption
AdapterRefreshInterval: 800

Average CPU usage ≈ 15%

 2)

News Ticker: Enaabled / Only importants items
Sidebar: Disabled
Peebles: Disabled
Pop-Up: Enabled / Only very importants items

Low Level of Interruption
AdapterRefreshInterval: 800

Average CPU usage ≈ 25%

The top CPU usage periods is during refresh.

The situation with sidebar seems to be better.

Unfortunately I've the Google sidebar so with two sidebars my screen becomes too small...but this is my problem

Off topic:  what's the logic about very important/important/most/all items to send to an adapter? What is the criterion to judge a news most important than another?

Thanks 

interesting stats.  The first thing i would do, is increase the AdapterRefreshInterval - 800 seconds is VERY frequently, and while it obviously your choice, bandwidth both for yourself and the publisher will add up very quickly.  Having a little more time between refreshes will also decrease the overal Particls CPU time.

Anyway, glad things are better for you and we're trying to make things even better for you in the upcomming builds. 

Federico - if you prefer the google sidebar, you can turn on pebbles and add the pebbles RSS feed to an RSS widget on the Google sidebar

I dont think it looks anywhere near as good as Particls - but its an option

Let me know if you don't know how to use Pebbles (Hint: It's in the advanced tab of the Particls 'Status and Options' window)

Ciao. 

Technically it works but the available Rss reader widgets for Google sidebar are a very bad visualization.

I'll wait a Particls widgets. Or I can try to implements it myself...

Thanks fo suggestion.

ps now my Particl's version is v0.9.2375.0 and AdapterRefreshInterval = 2400