Playing well with other applications (performance isn't always about speed)

Every few months or so I'll stumble across someone complaining that the SpamButcher spam stopper is slowing their system down.

I've never encountered any such issues in my testing, so I've dismissed the concerns since they weren't that frequent. Often people will install several new applications at once, and misdiagnose which one is causing performance issues. While SpamButcher is by nature fairly CPU intensive, measures have been taken to insure that it doesn't totally dominate system usage.

Certainly it may be enough to prevent gamers from getting the very best frame-rate, but I've always assumed they would shutdown any unneeded utilities before starting a fragging session.

A few weeks ago I was putting together a program to simulate a roulette wheel (don't ask why). It was sloppily coded, and was extremely resource intensive as a result. It worked fine, except every 30 seconds or so it would bog down. I eventually concluded that indeed, SpamButcher was the culprit.

The fact that this problem could occur at all suggests that Windows still doesn't offer completely preemptive multitasking.

A rigorous debugging session ensued, and we managed to do some fairly minor code adjustments that should make SpamButcher work and play much more kindly with others.

In short, SpamButcher "yields" time to other applications more often than it did before. This includes even when it's evaluating a given piece of email. If another application wants the CPU, the time it takes for the email spam filter to process the message is extended. However, more often the CPU is otherwise idle, and SpamButcher's performance is not significantly penalized.

My little roulette wheel simulation now runs smoothly.

So, if you think SpamButcher might be bogging down your system, make sure to download version 1.9i or later. It may help - not that we'd admit there was ever a problem in the first place.

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