ProcessController - A "Killer" App

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ProcessController - A "Killer" App

One of the most useful tools available in Zeta when something is misbehaving, is the deskbar replicant ProcessController. Launch the application. A window will than appear with some text and moving vertical bars.Those bars shows the activity of your processor(s) and the memory usage (RAM) in the form of bars. The higher those bars are, the more your system is loaded and more memory (RAM) is used.

If you click on the bars, a pop-up menu will appear, presenting you ProcessController's functionalities. To place ProcessController in the Deskbar, simply select the option "Live in the Deskbar" (if a replicant is already in the Deskbar, this option is checked).

ProcessController was designed with the option to also be used as a replicant on the desktop, so when you launch ProcessController the option "Show Replicants" will automatically be activated. To drag the replicant in a replicant-aware application (the Desktop for instance), click on the little hand at the bottom right of the bars, and without releasing the mouse's button, move it above a replicant-aware application's window. The "bars" will now also be hosted by that application.

Through it's popup menu you can on the display:

- View the acitivty of each individual team and thread graphically in real-time

- Quit any running application in a clean way(both background and non-background BApplications). Note: Not all teams are "true" application that can receive BMessages. Therefore, some teams will not appear in this menu. The kernel and the application server are examples of such teams.
- View the memory usage of the different teams / applications running in your system.

The "Kill, Debug, or Change Priority" menu allows you several different things:

- You can monitor the activity of the teams & threads running in your system.
  You can kill a team by selecting the team's name in the popup. You'll be given a chance to confirm or cancel this operation with a modal dialog.
- By selecting the thread's name in the popup, you'll get a modal dialog that will offer you to:
  - Kill that thread,
  - Debug that thread (useful for developers only. You can then start bdb by simply typing bdb in the window that appears!)
- You can see what priority has each thread by looking at what item is selected in the menu that appears when you select a thread.
- You can change a thread's priority by selecting the priority you wish in the priority menu that appears when you select the thread.

- If you have a multi-processor computer, you will have an equal number of items labeled "Processor" with a number afterwards. You can turn on or off each individual processor by selected the corresponding item. Active processors are identified by the check mark.
- Fast access to the Terminal
- Re-launch the Tracker (option only available if Tracker has stopped running)
- Re-launch the Deskbar (option only available of Deskbar has stopped running)
- The "Use Pulse's Settings for Colors" will allow you to change the colors of the replicant's bars. The colors used are the one selected in the "Deskbar Mode" preference for the Pulse application. If you don't like the default colors, you can select your own using Pulse

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