Growl Crash - Overwhelmed

[Mike]

Good day.
I turned up a gowl notifier with my ZenOss install.
Occasionally I get message storms, today over 500 messages while I was
out for lunch - this crashes growl.
It's a very messy crash - I'll get ghosted windows in random locations
of the screen until the growl process is cleared.

So far 4 hours is about the longest I can keep growl running with my
ZenOss alerts. Growl seems to crash at the sign of a storm. Am I
breaking a size limit?

Any suggestions?

Thanks

[Brian Dunnington]

Mike -

There is no limit within Growl per se and it tries to just show
whatever notifications it is sent. The app is limited by the system
resources (memory, cpu, etc) and it sounds like it is exhausting some
of them and causing the crash. That said, there is probably a
'usability' limit that is also being exceeded (could anyone actually
read and process 500 notifications at once, not to mention that they
couldnt all fit on the screen).

There is no universal throttle within Growl to limit the number of
notifications shown, and even if there was, it would simply draw out
the displaying of the notifications into a seemingly never-ending
cycle. I am always open to suggestions on how to improve the app
though, so I would be interested in your (and everyone's) thoughts on
what the correct behavior should be in this scenario (since having the
app crash is definitely not the right solution).

As for a more immediate solution, perhaps you could disable certain
notification types that are not important to you, or maybe change some
settings in the sending app to reduce the number of notifications
sent? I will think about it and see what else I can come up with to
help out at least temporarily until a better solution can be found.

- brian

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[Mike]

Ya, I strive for a 0 event day...
150 locations - 5-10 objects per location ... stuff adds up.
This morning I had 2300 messages in the queue. I believe it crashes
when it tries to render too many on the screen.
I thought I turned off sticky - turning it off again to see how it
behaves.

Thanks
-M

[Alan Montgomery]

On Wed, 02 May 2012 23:33:51 +0100, Brian Dunnington
<briandu...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Mike -
>
> There is no limit within Growl per se and it tries to just show
> whatever notifications it is sent. The app is limited by the system
> resources (memory, cpu, etc) and it sounds like it is exhausting some
> of them and causing the crash. That said, there is probably a
> 'usability' limit that is also being exceeded (could anyone actually
> read and process 500 notifications at once, not to mention that they
> couldnt all fit on the screen).
>
> There is no universal throttle within Growl to limit the number of
> notifications shown, and even if there was, it would simply draw out
> the displaying of the notifications into a seemingly never-ending
> cycle. I am always open to suggestions on how to improve the app
> though, so I would be interested in your (and everyone's) thoughts on
> what the correct behavior should be in this scenario (since having the
> app crash is definitely not the right solution).
>

First could be better handling of coalescing. First by more clients using
it - in the OPs case a second message saying system X is low on memory
should replace the first. Second better handling - many displays handle
coalescing by removing the old window and creating a new one, where as it
would be quicker if it simply updated the content of the old window.

You still need to add resilience - by saying that if an app sends more
than so many messages in a minute it is a problem - excess messages are
rejected with a too often error code and you get an overflow notification
on screen. The app is blocked while the overflow notification is displayed.
Similarly if total message traffic is too high the server should reject
with a busy error code, and you get busy notification.

You may also need to look at performance. If I drop 10 files into a folder
the folder watcher is monitoring I get about 30 notifications - and that
can take quite a while to display with all the updating and moving of
previous notifications - and the screen is virtually unusable for the 10
seconds it takes.

Another option is to create a high volume display that is designed to cope
with a burst of messages in a short time - say a simple list of the titles.

> As for a more immediate solution, perhaps you could disable certain
> notification types that are not important to you, or maybe change some
> settings in the sending app to reduce the number of notifications
> sent? I will think about it and see what else I can come up with to
> help out at least temporarily until a better solution can be found.
>

Also try different displays.

> - brian
>
>
> On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 1:03 PM, Mike <trg...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Good day.
>> I turned up a gowl notifier with my ZenOss install.
>> Occasionally I get message storms, today over 500 messages while I was
>> out for lunch - this crashes growl.
>> It's a very messy crash - I'll get ghosted windows in random locations
>> of the screen until the growl process is cleared.
>>
>> So far 4 hours is about the longest I can keep growl running with my
>> ZenOss alerts. Growl seems to crash at the sign of a storm. Am I
>> breaking a size limit?
>>
>> Any suggestions?
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> --
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
>> Groups "growl for windows" group.
>> To post to this group, send email to growl-fo...@googlegroups.com.
>> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
>> growl-for-wind...@googlegroups.com.
>> For more options, visit this group at
>> http://groups.google.com/group/growl-for-windows?hl=en.
>>
>

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