Cluessnewbie
May 2nd, 2005, 04:44 AM
-{ Quote: "One thing I do regularly is run Filemon and Regmon to identify poorly written software. In the context of these tools a poorly written application is one that polls (repeatedly queries) the file system or Registry for changes. Polling is undesirable because it degrades performance. A thread that polls sleeps for the polling intervals, wakes up to perform its queries, and then goes back to sleep.
When the thread wakes up and the kernel schedules it the system must context-switch away from potentially useful work to the polling thread. The context switch results in an invalidation of the translation lookaside buffer (TLB – a high-speed cache of virtual to physical memory translations) of the processor and consumption of CPU resources as the thread executes. In addition, the thread references code and data as it executes, which the memory manager must make resident in physical memory, thus consuming memory resources.
If polling is so bad, what’s the alternative? If an application wants to respond in a timely manner to Registry changes it can use the RegNotifyChangeKeyValue API, and for file system changes it can use ReadDirectoryChangesW or FindFirstChangeNotification. " }-
http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/03/polling-and-msn-desktop-search.html#comments
Time to stop using programs that do polling like MSAS, MJ registry watcher etc and switch to Regdefend and PrevX?
When the thread wakes up and the kernel schedules it the system must context-switch away from potentially useful work to the polling thread. The context switch results in an invalidation of the translation lookaside buffer (TLB – a high-speed cache of virtual to physical memory translations) of the processor and consumption of CPU resources as the thread executes. In addition, the thread references code and data as it executes, which the memory manager must make resident in physical memory, thus consuming memory resources.
If polling is so bad, what’s the alternative? If an application wants to respond in a timely manner to Registry changes it can use the RegNotifyChangeKeyValue API, and for file system changes it can use ReadDirectoryChangesW or FindFirstChangeNotification. " }-
http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/03/polling-and-msn-desktop-search.html#comments
Time to stop using programs that do polling like MSAS, MJ registry watcher etc and switch to Regdefend and PrevX?