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What do the *portable.exe processes do?

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ceving
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What do the *portable.exe processes do?

Hi,

for each program an additional process gets started which has the portable suffix. Each of those processes eat 5MG RAM.

What do they do and why do one needs them?

cu Sascha

powerjuce
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Ehy ceving,

And welcome to PortableApps.com
Those other processes are the launchers that we use to keep the application portable. They are the ones that keep the settings on your drive, and clean up the computer after you exit the application.

So they are important, and you need them.

Regards
~powerjuce

Please search before posting. ~Thanks

dragonmage
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They shouldn't be using 5MB

They shouldn't be using 5MB of ram though. A few hundred KB maybe.

Bruce Pascoe
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Not much you can do about it

Most of that is NSIS overhead, I suspect. NSIS was really designed to make installers, not launchers, and RAM usage really isn't an issue for an installer that will usually only be run once.

dragonmage
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I had never noticed they used

I had never noticed they used that much. I had thought they used much less for some reason.

ceving
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Putty.exe eats 5028KB and PuttyPortable.exe 5044KB

This shows how it looks on my system:
http://vs-301.hello-server.com/~szi/postings/2009-03-06/Portable-Apps-Me...

Does this look significantly different on other systems?

The Firefox wrapper is a bit smaller but eats also about 4MB.

cu Sascha

J Neutron
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Ummm....

Difference between 5028kb and 5044kb is 16kb.

There are 1024kb in a MB.

Jim

neutron1132 (at) usa (dot) com

JCSalomon
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But…

Remember that both processes are running. PuttyPortable.exe is in addition to Putty.exe, not replacing it.

Steve Lamerton
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I

think, but dont quote me on this, that because Putty is a child process of Putty Portable it adds its memory usage together.

MaienM
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I believe steve stands

I believe steve stands correct here. As far as I know, the launchers barely use any memory, I can personally don't think of any reason why they would use a lot since they don't do much while the app is still running.....

Behold, the DutchLander has arrived.
Grammatical errors are copyrighted.

SakiTC
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I must disagree...

I must disagree with Steve. Try starting for example VLC Media Player Portable and monitor processes in the task manager. VLCPortable.exe starts first and very soon reaches about 8M (8.392 K). vlc.exe (the application itself) starts from small numbers, smaller than VLCPortable.exe, and grows over 70M (71.352K to be exact) and stops their - of course, before you start playing anything. If it was a parent process, the number couldn't remain smaller.
But as Jacob said (see below), 4M or 8M shouldn't be a problem. I don't think any of portable apps available here goes much over 8M.

No typin th las lette ca sav yo plent o spac

Jacob Mastel
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4mb?

Common lets get real. How big of a deal is 4mb of ram? You rarely find computers in the wild with less than 512mbs. And most people have at least a gig. 4mbs really isn't that big of a deal. Plus if you have the extra RAM it doesn't slow down the computer to fill a little more of the RAM. RAM access is instant use it :P. More RAM doesn't slow down a computers performance (provided you don't go over your limit) so you might as well eat it. Blum

I saw the question a bit below. The only thing that the launcher does while the app is running is to check every second if the program is running. If it does run then it moves stuff back to drive, if it is it waits a second and tries again.

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