Below are details of how WeatherBug performs testing on the WeatherBug application and how you can perform these tests yourself on the WeatherBug application or any application to monitor CPU, Memory and Network usage over time.

How to log application performance

To get a detailed look at the actual WeatherBug CPU and Memory usage, we can use the performance monitor application to view how the CPU usage varies over time.  You can access the performance monitor application in windows by choosing "Run" from the Start Menu and typeing in perfmon.msc and hitting enter. The following window will appear on your screen:

Right click on the "Counter Logs" item that is selected in grey above enter the name WeatherBug for the "New Log Settings" as seen in the figure below.

After clicking OK, you will see the following dialog:

Next click on "Add Counters" and add CPU Usage for the "Weather" process as seen below:

Continue to add the %Privileged Tim and %User Time as well as the "Working Set" (The Working Set is the related to the amount of total Memory that your application is using). When you hit the close button, your dialog should look like the following:

Then change to the "Log Files" tab and make sure that it looks like the following dialog:

Now click OK, and then right click on the WeatherBug item that is now on the list and choose "Start". This will start creating a text file that has the CPU usage of the WeatherBug every minute for as long as you want to store data. There will be a new text file for each hour the the performance monitor runs.

Once you have let this run for a while, import this data into an Excel Spreadsheet and perform some analysis of the CPU and Memory Usage over time. Below are the results from the tests I performed. These tests were run on my main computer that I use at work. For the duration of the test, I will leave my WeatherBug application running in the background.

A Detailed look at WeatherBug CPU Usage

I let the perfmon log file run from 7:52PM last night until 11:23 AM this morning. Now lets take a look at the average, and Peak CPU usage. The WeatherBug has been running the whole time in the system tray only. I have not brought the WeatherBug to the foreground during this time period at all.

%Processor Time: 0.00323% Average CPU usage, 0.26% Maximum CPU Usage

%User Time: 0.00114% Average %User Time, 0.13% Maximum %User Time

%Priveledged Time: 0.00209% Average %Privledged Time.

As you can see (and you can run the tests for yourself), the WeatherBug takes negligible CPU resources when running in the system tray.

Detailed look at WeatherBug Memory Usage

The "Working Set" values that we logged to look at WeatherBug memory usage are not exactly the same values that you see for memory usage when you look at the individual processes in task manager. I am not sure why Microsoft does not have a value for memory usage in the performance monitor application that corresponds to what you see in task manager, but I think this is the closest value. Here is what we see in the log file for the working set for WeatherBug:

Average Working Set: 10.437MB

Minimum Working Set:  10.301MB

Maximum Working Set:  10.575MB

As you can see, the memory usage of WeatherBug is very constant. Also, as I will show later, this amount of memory usage is very comparable to what AIM or Yahoo Messangers use.

Detailed look at WeatherBug Network Usage

Now we will take a look at WeatherBug network/bandwidth usage. The best program I have come accross that allows you to monitor network usage by application is called CommView, which is developed by TamoSoft.  The following picture shows how CommView looks. I have highlighted the last 2 columns which show the process name, and the number of bytes transferred to a certain host.

To measure the average bandwidth usage for a particular process, all you need to do is allow CommView to capture the total number of bytes transferred over a fixed time period and the average bandwidth usage will be equal to "Total Bytes Transferred"/"Total Time".

For the WeatherBug, I ran the test for 24 hours and here is the data that I gathered.

Measurement Start Time and Date: 6/1/2005 12:54PM

No consider that in general a modem today has a capacity of around 56,000 bits per second and a T-1 line has a capacity of 1,500,000 bits per second.

So for a modem user, WeatherBug is taking up about 0.0004% of availabe bandwidth and for a company on a T-1 line, a WeatherBug user is taking up 0.000016% of the available bandwidth resources.

I invite all IT folks to take the same approach that I did above and see for yourself that WeatherBug is very light on Bandwidth usage.

One complaint that i do get is that WeatherBug generates a TON of log entries in my firewall logs. This is true. One thing that WeatherBug does is make an HTTP call back to our servers every 5 minutes to check for severe weather alerts and homeland security alerts that are issued by the National Weather Service and the Emergency Broadcasting System. This will generate quite a few entries in the firewall log file, but all of these requests for data or VERY VERY small and should not be a major concern. It is definitely worth the fact that these alert checks could literally save yours, or an employee of yours life.

WeatherBug Resource Usage compared to similar applicaitons

The results are in!

WeatherBug ranked 5th in terms of average CPU usage, but it was well below the CPU usage of The Weather Channel Desktop app and is very comparable to the AccuWeather aplication. The CPU usage of all these applications is very low and does not take a significant amount of computer resources.

WeatherBug ranked second best in terms of memory usage, it was even well below AOL and Yahoo Instant Messangers. As compared to the other weather applications, it uses much less memory resources than both the Weather Channel Desktop Weather AND AccuWeather Desktop Alerts.

WeatherBug also ranked second in terms of using the least amount of bandwidth. Yahoo Messanger had by far the least (I will probably test this again...maybe I was loggesd out). The AccuWeather Desktop Alerts uses the most bandwidth at 152 bits per second.

So, there you have it from a competitive standpoint, WeatherBug is definitely not a resource hog as it compares to other applicaitons!

See for yourself. You can use the same methodology that I spell out in the document above. Let us know if you come up with different results by emailing our support team at support@weatherbug.com.

I re-ran all of the Resource comparison tests on another computer just to make sure that all of the results were similar. Here is what I got the second time around...I also added in a new desktop applicaiton called ModYa which is an RSS aggregator.

The results did not change significantly, which validates the prior test that I performed. The WeatherBug still ranks very well when put up against similar applications. In this second test, it beat out all competitive weather applicaitons in all categories.

WeatherBug will continue its efforts to maximize the efficiency of the WeatherBug application as we come out with new products, this will always be a driving factor in our product development to ensure that minimal resources are used on your computer.

Chris Sloop

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