GigAlarm: Sytem freeze/slowdown caused by too many windows

[Mister E]

I have set a repeating alarm with a period of 1-60 minutes and I find that if I leave the computer on overnight I can find the sytem slow or even un-responsive when I return. The problem seems to happen even if I hibernate the computer.

[Siegfried]

Yes, what you describe is possible, but to me what you're really describing is a system limitation, and not a bug in GigAlarm. (More on that later.) All programs will have trouble when memory is low. GigAlarm for maximum speed and independence creates a separate thread (sub-program) for each alarm window, and thus if many alarms are active at once the memory demand will be large. In the case of your alarm there could be hundreds of windows active.

How can this problem be solved? In the case of a computer that's just inactive you can;

• Change the alarm to a non-window alarm.
• Set a cut-off of around 30 minutes or less. You should find that in most cases no more than 3 windows will be open at once.

A hibernated computer is less of a problem as GigAlarm has a special feature to handle this exact issue, called "Ignore alarm if time missed". (In earlier versions for space reasons it was called "Casual" but the name caused confusion.) That will prevent the flood of windows appearing when the computer is resumed; it's the purpose of the function. It was written in so GigAlarm doesn't do silly things like sync the clock 50 times at start-up.

Back to the "is this a bug" issue, to us this is not a bug, but it definitely is a limitation! It's hard to write something that's flexible for experienced users but at the same time easy to use for new users. Even so, this issue highlights that we probably should find a solution to this. A fixed window limitation would solve it, but we do know of users that want hundreds of windows at once. We'll look into this while working on GigAlarm v1.33.

[Siegfried]

The new Beta of GigAlarm 1.33 has a feature that prevents this problem happening. (It can be disabled. )