Martin's dashboard

I'm a Firefox 3 user myself, but for comparison I tested the Dashboard CPU usage in Firefox 3, Chrome, and IE7: in Firefox the CPU usage went up to 45% when moving from List View to the Dashboard. Chrome used 20%. In IE7, however, the CPU usage drops to near-zero after loading the page.

I think Chrome's 20% is also way too much, so this is not just a Firefox 3 problem! I understand that Flash must use CPU power while animating the graphs, but after that it just displays a plain image of the graph. Why on earth does it need any CPU power at all to do that?! Seriously: I don't need the Flash animations, just give me plain old image maps with javascript mouse-over popups if this problem cannot be fixed. IE7's behavior indicates that a fix should be achievable, though.

So this is really a serious problem: It hinders my productivity if my CPU time is wasted -- and increasing productivity is what RescueTime is all about! :-)

My current workaround is to always select the List View when leaving the site open in the background.

I also tested the site http://www.fusioncharts.com/Demos/Blu..., and it has the same problem (FF3 CPU usage 35%, Chrome 10%), so I guess the underlying problem is in your vendor's product, either FusionCharts or the Flash plugin or both.

Ok folks, we have just published an update to the RescueTime data collector for Windows (1.0.7) - this includes support for the Google Chrome browser.

You can get the update by selecting "Check for updates" in the system tray menu or by restarting RescueTime for Windows.

Post here if you have any issues with URL resolution and Google Chrome.

Thanks!

Just wanted to let everyone know that we are actively working on compiling in support for Google Chrome. I will post an update to this thread as soon as I have an ETA ;)

Thanks!

Jovi Juan - that is a known bug in Firefox/Flash.
See this thread http://getsatisfaction.com/rescuetime... – Martin, on September 03, 2008 07:58

I agree 100%. I'd really like to be able to click on one of the hourly blocks on the "Time Spent" widget on the Dashboard and see that broken down into an hourly view which shows which apps, sites, tags, etc. were used minute-by minute over that hour so as to get a good overview as to how time is being spent.

I agree 100%. I'd really like to be able to click on one of the hourly blocks on the "Time Spent" widget on the Dashboard and see that broken down into an hourly view which shows which apps, sites, tags, etc. were used minute-by minute over that hour so as to get a good overview as to how time is being spent.

I agree 100%. I'd really like to be able to click on one of the hourly blocks on the "Time Spent" widget on the Dashboard and see that broken down into an hourly view which shows which apps, sites, tags, etc. were used minute-by minute over that hour so as to get a good overview as to how time is being spent.

I agree 100%. I'd really like to be able to click on one of the hourly blocks on the "Time Spent" widget on the Dashboard and see that broken down into an hourly view which shows which apps, sites, tags, etc. were used minute-by minute over that hour so as to get a good overview as to how time is being spent.

Any news about it?

The additional information is a great help. There is currently a bug open with Mozilla on this issue (it affects other websites too - not just RescueTime.com). You can see the bug information and progress here:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug...

Sorry for being inactive for such a long time, I just wanted to give you an update on the issue. I still experience high CPU usage when viewing the dashboard.
I tried to identify when it works and when it won't. My observations so far are that most of the time a "stand-by / wake-up" cycle leaves my laptop (ThinkPad T43p running WinXP) in a state where it works. As soon as I start some media app (iTunes, WindowsMediaPlayer, even youtube or other sites that embed flash-players) the cpu usage of firefox goes up (only when the dashboard is displayed).
btw. interesting enough a full restart leaves the laptop in a state where it does not work. So I guess something in stand-by/wake-up is broken on my Laptop - and that error somehow counters the other problem.

As I workaround I disabled/minimized some of the graphs on the dashboard and that helps a lot (especially disabling the Score-graph). I'm down to 10% CPU usage with only "Time Spent", "Goals" and "Apps&Sites" active on the dashboard.

I inspected the firefox process in ProcessExplorer (Tool from Sysinternals) and extracted the following stack information:

ntkrnlpa.exe!KiDispatchInterrupt+0x7f
ntkrnlpa.exe!MmIsNonPagedSystemAddressValid+0x93
ntkrnlpa.exe!NtFreeVirtualMemory+0x59bf
ntkrnlpa.exe!NtFreeVirtualMemory+0x62c7
ntkrnlpa.exe!KeReleaseInStackQueuedSpinLockFromDpcLevel+0xb14
ntdll.dll!KiFastSystemCallRet
kernel32.dll!VirtualQuery+0x15
kernel32.dll!SetThreadContext+0x44
kernel32.dll!SetUnhandledExceptionFilter+0x2b
NPSWF32.dll!native_ShockwaveFlash_TCallLabel+0x743d
xul.dll!JVM_StartupJVM+0x1cb5
MSCTF.dll!TF_UninitSystem+0x9dc

Of course the stack info doesn't look the same all the time, but when the CPU usage is high than most of the time
kernel32.dll!SetUnhandledExceptionFilter+0x2b
NPSWF32.dll!native_ShockwaveFlash_TCallLabel+0x743d
is somewhere near the bottom.
Don't know if this helps.