I use some programs for work that are doing quite a bit of heavy computing. Sometimes, they freeze. Unfortunately, they freeze with RAM/CPU usage, so it’s hard to tell if a program is actually frozen or if it’s still working. Is there another way besides using task manager to see if a program is frozen or still working?

  • bothunter@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Not without a debugger and the knowledge to know how to use it as well as knowledge of what normal operation of the program looks like under the debugger.

    But when a program is “not responding” what that means is that the message pump loop from Windows is not progressing. Basically, every interaction between the Windows desktop and the program goes into a queue that the program picks up and processes. These are things like mouse clicks, key presses, window being moved or resized, etc. If the queue keeps growing, windows assumes the process is stuck and it’s usually correct for well written programs.

    But when programs do something stupid like not use a separate UI thread and background processing thread, then things get messy and you see this behavior even when the program is operating “normally”