Utility to kill Sage

[ldavis]

OK. We all know that Sage is very stable but still it occasionally hangs. I can always go to Taskmgr and kill the program, but I would like to automate the process to make Sage more user firendly.

To that end, I am trying to write a simple application to check to see if Sage is hung and then kill it if it is hung. This would be run each time the "reset" button is pressed on the remote. I know how to unconditionally kill an application from the command line so that is easy to do. Determining if the app is hung seems more difficult. There are several articles online but since I am not a programmer (last time I did any serious coding it was Fortran) the approaches do not make sense to me. Thanks in advance for your help.

Lain

[krutaw]

Originally posted by ldavis
To that end, I am trying to write a simple application to check to see if Sage is hung and then kill it if it is hung.

Lain,

I'm not going to tell you you're wrong about the way you're looking at this, only that I look at it a bit differently. Here's why...

I'm currently using a PVR-350/nForceII chipset and Malore's Commercial Advance STV beta. This combination hangs every once in awhile, and requires several changes in the software to get the video back up and running through the tvout of the PVR-350.

Now, with that said, Sage is still up and running just fine, the tv-out just hung. *sigh* So, why not just let the user decide when to kill the application, and assign the kill application to a button on the remote control (this is what I did.)

[carlgar]

Originally posted by ldavis
OK. We all know that Sage is very stable but still it occasionally hangs. I can always go to Taskmgr and kill the program, but I would like to automate the process to make Sage more user firendly.

I would suggest that the next time you think Sage is hung you look at the CPU usage in the Taskmgr. I have noticed that when I think Sage is hung it is a result of the system task running and using most (95%-98%) of the CPU. I have seen the system task take the CPU for as long as 20 min. I believe that Sage is probably still running but very slowly because of little CPU time.

[ldavis]

Krutaw,

Thanks for the suggestion. That is actually my fall back position and probably where I will end up. I think that you are right and that solution will be easier and less likely to produce unexpected results. I will need to give some thought on how to make sure that the kill button is hard to accidently press. I just thought it would be a little more user friendly (Read: No more "The tv froze again!!"). Ultimately, there is always the off button on the PC, but I have never been able to convince my significant other to use it.

Carlgar,

I always check to make sure that Sage is "Not Responding" before killing the app. On my systems, I have never seen CPU utilization peak with 95% going to system idle tasks. I have seen 95% or so of the current CPU being used going to system idle task, but only when overall CPU usage is low. In either case, to me, 20 min is way to long to wait for the system to correct itself. I would consider that a hung application

[falchulk]

I have a built in menu option that runs taskkill.exe (internal windows app that can shutdown taks by name). It then goes into a loop for 6 seconds to make sure that sage is closed then it starts it again. This comes in very handy at times.

[PaulG]

go to www.sysinternals.com & download the pstools.zip, it has a handy little utility (actually they are ALL handy especially if you are a CLI type person) called pskill which allows you to kill a process by PID or name