Good, Bad or Ugly experiences with App Tamer?

[fishmonkey]

hi, does anyone have any experience with using App Tamer on their production or show machines?

http://www.stclairsoft.com/AppTamer/

it's essentially a fancy GUI that uses low-level OS X commands to suspend or re-prioritise processes on the fly...

[Angus Turner]

Seems like the CPU equivalent of those 'ram compressors' that claimed to improve performance by clearing all the ram out, but actually made systems slower because it turfed out all the OS's caches.

Also seems like the kind of thing to conveniently decide one of QLab's background processes/threads needs de-prioritising or killing just as QLab is about to use it!

If you have your show computer properly configured there shouldn't be any reason to pause any 'unnecessary' processes.

Mind you, haven't used it but just seems like something that should be steered clear of...

Thanks
Angus Turner
angus...@gmail.com

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[Andy Lang]

On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 4:33 AM, fishmonkey <fishmo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> hi, does anyone have any experience with using App Tamer on their production
> or show machines?

If you were to use such an app and have a problem, it would not be
supported by us. Our only answer would be to remove that app and let
the OS and QLab do their jobs as intended before we can do further
troubleshooting.

-Andy

[Paul Gotch]

On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 11:25:50PM +1000, Angus Turner wrote:
> Seems like the CPU equivalent of those 'ram compressors' that claimed to
> improve performance by clearing all the ram out, but actually made systems
> slower because it turfed out all the OS's caches.

It's generally much better from an energy consumption point of view to
run as fast as possible for the minimum time possible. So I suspect the
use of this app would actually reduce battery life over all.

It's also not usually a good idea to layer a second set of heuristics
above the heuristics the OS already has for scheduling and 'napping'
processes.

-p
(Yes my day job is working for a processor design company)
--
Paul Gotch
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[fishmonkey]

all good points, which more or less cover why i haven't installed it. i was just wondering if anybody else had actually tried it though.

i reason i was interested in it was because it would be handy when out and about on battery power to be able to easily have specific processes suspended automatically. for example, a web browser with lots of tabs that wastes CPU cycles whilst it sits in the background (but which i don't want to quit as i may need it again in a few minutes, and relaunching it would chew power).

ordinarily i wouldn't even consider such an app on a show machine, however my main show computer is also my main production machine...

[Andy Lang]

On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 11:05 PM, fishmonkey <fishmo...@gmail.com> wrote:

ordinarily i wouldn't even consider such an app on a show machine, however my main show computer is also my main production machine...

Honestly, what I would recommend in that situation is making a second partition on the drive, and having a dedicated OS install for shows, and one for other use. Just hold down [option] while booting to change which partition it boots to by default. 

-Andy

[fishmonkey]

i would do that if i felt it was necessary, however i have my machine well configured and maintained and don't have any issues. i uninstall or deactivate various things before running shows. besides, my machine already triple-boots OS X, Windows, and Linux.

in the end i decided to not bother with testing App Tamer. one less thing to worry about...