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Slife 2.0 Memory Use
We've received a few emails asking us why Slife's memory usage increases over time. Since this is something others probably want to know, I've brought the discussion over to the forum.
First of all, it's true, we need to improve memory management on Slife 2.0. There are ways we can optimize the app's memory use and we will be doing that in upcoming releases.
Memory optimization is quite challenging in Slife because it's inversely proportional to performance. In order to make the visualizations zippy, we cache a lot of the "activity dots" and their stats in memory. So, as you use the application, it accumulates more dots and builds up its cache. After a few days, it's not uncommon for Slife to be using more than 100MB of memory. Not ideal.
One of the solutions is to separate the activity "observer" from the "visualizer". You always keep the "observer" running - it could even be a background app, a small, fast, efficient background app. Then, whenever you would like to check your stats and activities (and even configure the "observer"), you bring up the "visualizer".
A lot of people have suggested this, and we've always been concerned about the perception that Slife might be considered spyware or used with "evil" intent if we make it somewhat invisible. But we might explore that option in the future.
First of all, it's true, we need to improve memory management on Slife 2.0. There are ways we can optimize the app's memory use and we will be doing that in upcoming releases.
Memory optimization is quite challenging in Slife because it's inversely proportional to performance. In order to make the visualizations zippy, we cache a lot of the "activity dots" and their stats in memory. So, as you use the application, it accumulates more dots and builds up its cache. After a few days, it's not uncommon for Slife to be using more than 100MB of memory. Not ideal.
One of the solutions is to separate the activity "observer" from the "visualizer". You always keep the "observer" running - it could even be a background app, a small, fast, efficient background app. Then, whenever you would like to check your stats and activities (and even configure the "observer"), you bring up the "visualizer".
A lot of people have suggested this, and we've always been concerned about the perception that Slife might be considered spyware or used with "evil" intent if we make it somewhat invisible. But we might explore that option in the future.
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Inappropriate?Are you caching all the dots for today or for all time. If you're caching for all time isn't that against the purpose of caching? I can tell you that I never actually scroll back in time (partly because for a while I didn't know how) so I would wager that 99% of people don't look at anything other than the dots that are currently on the screen.
I propose three things:
1) Don't cache the things we aren't going to use. Certainly don't cache multiple days worth of data.
2) Don't cache activity dots that are not long dots or cache less info. I never look at the little dots because they aren't useful to me and I can't consistently get my mouse on them because they're so tiny. I also don't care but someone else might.
3) Change your caching format or use a database instead of memory. Using BDB or SQLite shouldn't slow things at all, we should be able to query a million rows in under 300ms (the fastest the human mind can process new information and visual queues).
Optional 4th) Stop using the dots. Almost nobody understands them and they're sucking up a lot of memory for no reason.
I don't think the dots help the app at all. The app is largely a statistical tool so giving access to the raw data isn't actually that helpful except in the rare instance. So it's important that we be able to access the raw data somehow, but the average user and most power users are going to be happy with a pretty picture of some sort instead of all the dots.
Spend more effort making the stats tools good and reduce the memory usage you'll find a lot of happy users. -
Inappropriate?No, we are not caching the dots for all time - just for the view you are looking at. This is so that if the view needs to be redrawn, you don't need to go back and retrieve those items again and again.
Thanks for your feedback, it's great to hear. We find that many people like and use the Day View and there's a lot we can do still in terms of performance improvements. We will take that route for now!
