AutoFiler Dog Slow, also Insane Memory Use

[J. Cearley]

I looked in to Automaton from finding it on the MacUpdate site and
gave it a little bit of prodding; I did a comparison of AutoFiler with
Hazel to see which one was "better" at least for my uses, and
discovered some critical flaws with AutoFiler:

It's _very_ slow. On a folder of maybe 3 files it can be quick, but on
my Downloads folder (a total of 600mb of data, mostly in subfolders
which AutoFiler isn't checking) it ends up taking several minutes to
complete trivial rules (such as just checking if a domain name is in
the source spotlight field and filing it under a directory based on
that) as well as it seems to be using "insane" amounts of memory.

After spending a few hours trying to see if I could get it to work
right it was up to 100mb RAM according to Activity Monitor, after
giving it a second try with redownloading from the main site it
rockets up to around 60mb on a trivial scan (just finding extensions
and filing). Hazel has been running for two days now with more rules
set and only is using 35mb as well as executing rules exceptionally
fast.

I'm sort of baffled how AutoFiler is behaving. I want to use it
instead of Hazel as it allows more complex rules but its faring worse
than Hazel or a simple shell script for me at this point.

[Chris]

Hi,

There is a whole section in the FAQ about memory usage. You should be
very cautious in interpreting stats from things like Activity Monitor,
because its very difficult to understand all the interactions between
shared libraries, 64 bit processes, loaded modules and so forth. As I
point out in the FAQ, something like Growl in some circumstances can
show 2GB of memory usage, but it isn't really true.

It might be worth you sending me your AutoFiler rules to the the
support email address, so I can see if you are doing something wrong.
If you have any specific stats on how long Hazel takes to do something
as well as Automaton, it might also help as well.

[J. Cearley]

On Sep 28, 7:51 pm, Chris <automa...@me.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> There is a whole section in the FAQ about memory usage. You should be
> very cautious in interpreting stats from things like Activity Monitor,
> because its very difficult to understand all the interactions between
> shared libraries, 64 bit processes, loaded modules and so forth. As I
> point out in the FAQ, something like Growl in some circumstances can
> show 2GB of memory usage, but it isn't really true.
>

Hrmm.

Also, I finally got a chance to stopwatch the sorts and AutoFiler
takes about 00:00:45 when initially activated to sort about 20 files,
and 00:00:40 when I drag and drop seven disk images back in to the
download folder so it counts as something has changed and files them
back in to the proper directory. Hazel takes 00:00:02 to sort them
back after being dropped in to the folder for me.

It's tolerable if the memory use isn't as bad as Activity Monitor
claims but still quite puzzling.

[Chris]

I would still like to see the rules you have. Maybe you are somehow
traversing subfolders in Automaton, but not Hazel or something. How
many files in total do you have in Downloads?