"The Hibernator" Support and Feedback

[woohoo]

Arkay

Fantastic application and very clever . Love the little profiler...

I've put it through its paces and it works entirely to specification... except when it gets to my problem with the still-buffering-after-stopping-tv-problem. In fact, even that works if I set the CPU limit high enough (I had it around 15%). When I do that it goes into standby (not forced) which surprised me. So far so good...

My problem is that the TV buffering leads to total CPU usage of around 5-11% (it's volatile). That's way above CPU usage with music (around 1-3%), so if I set the CPU cut-out to go into standby when the buffering is going on, when I'm playing music it stops the machine in the middle of a track.

So I think it's not going to work for me. I'm not sure if this is the sort of problem you were saying you might be able to fix in V 2. ? If your CPU monitor discounted the effect of the buffering somehow (not sure how you'd do this) I could set the cut-out point below the CPU usage level for music and all would be sweet.

I know there aren't many in my situation, so I assume your Hibernator will make a bunch of other people very happy. It's great stuff.

[arkay]

Woohoo,

Thanks Interesting situation you're in there. You're right though, you don't want to set it to high as it'll go to sleep on your during a tv recroding as well and thew whole idea is to make it sleep after a scheduled recording.

I will be adding CPU, disk and Network monitoring to the next version. Perhaps you'll be able to find the sweet spot amongst those three...

Cheers,
Arkay.

[bella]

Hi Arkay,

Have been fiddling around with my second rig to make "The Hibernator" work. No result. Comes immediately out of hibernation.
Standby does work!

Here are the Bios settings on my Asus X P4S800 MOBO:

Power Management > User Defined
Video off option > Suspend Off
Video Off method > DPMS suspend (display power management)
HDD PowerDown > 3 min.
ACPI Suspend to Ram > Enabled
Suspend mode > 3-4 min.
PWR Button < 4 sec > Soft Off
Power Up control > Power loss restart (disabled)
Wake/Power up on ext. modem > disabled
Power up on PCI device > disabled
Power up by PS/2 keyboard > disabled
Automotive Power up > disabled

Regards,

ED

[eepunk]

Arkay,

Once more into the breach.

I will be donating to your plasma fund, even though I don't use either of your products.

Your invaluable assistance over the past twelve months has made my MCE experience one mostly of joy and less of frustration.

Cheers, for all the hard work and for all your time.

(Dont worry Mike, donation will be headed your way too, it's you that makes this all possible)

[bella]

Dumb question of the week:

If MCE can tell the OS to come out of hibernation to start recording a pog, why can it not be told to switch off at a certain time, regardless of what kind of activity the cpu is performing?

[philzgr8]

I could be wrong here bella but I think it can. I think you can use the command "shutdown -f" in a batch file and schedule it!

P.S. I think the shortcoming is that this might not actually put it in standby if that's what you wanted to do.

[bella]

Tried a little pog somewhere along the line like that. Came out of hinernation immediately after being put in hibernation. Must be the mobo.
Hibernation on my main mce rig works pretty well with the normal windows power apllication.

[philzgr8]

yes hibernation seems to be working OK for me but I think I do occasionally find it awake when it shouldn't be. I might give The Hibernator a go just to see if it makes a difference. Interestingly I read a post alluding to the possibility that the BRP task is not ending gracefully when scheduled and that this can keep the machine from hibernating. I might check that one out too.

[mjj1998]

Hi arkay,

I've got a question with regards to CPU spikes - I noticed that my PC seems to have a spike every 10s or so (from 2-5% up to 15%) when idle (no MCE GUI) and was wondering how Hibernator would deal with this? I compared my CPU usage for viewing TV (& with the TV off, but still buffering in the background) and the CPU typically runs at about 15%.

This makes it difficult to set a threshold, as it would need to be less than 15% (to be sure nothing is stopped when unintended), but my CPU appears to occasionally spike above this value. Is that enough to stop Hibernator from working its mojo??

Thanks for all your hard work, these programs are amazing

Cheers,
~MJ.

[arkay]

MJ,

You're situation is a little odd. All I can say is to set up The Hibernator with no screensaver. Set your threshold to something you think should be right, set the screensaver timeout in windows to 1 minute and wait and see what happens.

Try it when the system is idle (though yours never really is for some reason), and then schedule a recording and see what happens when that recording is taking place (no gui though). etc etc. It's going to take some playing but I think you can get it right.

V2 of the hibernator (about 85% complete at the moment), also uses disk transfer rates and network transfer to identify an idle system. When that's out you may have more luck though like I said, yours is wierd as it constantly buffers and constantly uses cpu, even when the gui is shut down.

Each time it goes into hibernate (or not) depending on your settings you will get detailed information in the log "c:\windows\Arksofts Hibernator.log" that should enable you to see a visible difference between when it is recording and when it is truly idle.

The spikes will affect the average but it is averaged out across the last 10 seconds readings. I used 10 secs to make it react faster. Perhaps in the next version I will have it calculate a rolling average over a 30 second period. I was going to make it user configurable but didn't want to bog the interface down with the technicalities.

Everyones systems are going to be different so any feedback you can provide will help me to better the app. My system is wierd too. It went to sleep today while recording Doctor Who, CPU utilisation was only .04 of a percent!!!! I've now set my idle to .03% Most of the time my machine used 5% plus for a recording so something screwy was going on and the recording probably would've failed anyway (I think it wasn't actually recording at all, just thought it was).

Anyway. With enough experimenting I'm sure you can make it work until v2 comes out and then we can really nail down the accuracy.

I've also made it non MCE specific at the moment but I might see if I can include some smarts in v2 to check what MCE is up to before it even thinks about sleeping. That would solve problems such as yours as it would not sleep if a recording is in progress etc.

Have you rebuilt your system at all?

Cheers,
Arkay.

P.S. I'm off on holidays for a week after tonight so if I don't reply back too fast you'll know why!

P.P.S. In addition to the above you might want to take a look at perfmon (included with MCE and XP etc). Just go start-Run and type in perfmon. You can add metrics for just about anything you can think of and see what the utilisation is for everything on your system. It may help you track down what is wrong with your config.