I have a theory: Microsoft is trying to drive me insane.
You may recollect that last week I was flummoxed (ohhh, good word and one that I have never managed to use in a column before) by the appearance of a ridiculously high rate of deferred procedure calls (DPC) on my PC, which is running Windows XP.
Rising from their normal and intermittent maximum of no more than about 2% processor utilization, DPCs on my desktop inexplicably rose to a remarkable and continuous 30% to 40%! This, in turn, pushed the total system utilization to a more or less continuous 100%, with the inevitable result that the machine was no longer what you might think of as responsive.
But what was the cause? A bad driver could have been the issue, but I couldn’t find any way to determine what process or processes were generating the DPCs (it seems from my research that tools for this do exist for Windows 2000 and 2003, but not for XP). It also seems there’s a lot of discussion in forums going back to the 1990s about mysterious high DPC rates, but as far as I could figure there’s not a single cause or set of causes that anyone can point to.
Well, to just make the whole problem even more mysterious, a couple of days ago, out of the blue and for no discernable reason, the DPC rate dropped! Yep, one day a solid 30% to 40% and the next an intermittent 2% at most! I had changed nothing! No hardware was added or, more relevantly, removed.
There were also no chickens sacrificed, no prayers made to St. Jude (the patron saint of lost causes), and the next syzygy of the sun, moon, and Earth isn’t until February 2008.
So, the only rational explanation is that Microsoft is messing with me. If you have a better idea, please, let me know. All I know is that everything seems to be back to normal. Well, as normal as a PC suffering from advanced Winrot can be.
My DPC diversion into the wilds of Windows was yet another speed bump in the goal I had a few weeks ago to evaluate a groupware system called Simple Groupware. With all these distractions, I had to keep putting off a serious review, but thanks to several readers who got it running and provided access, I got to play, er, test the system a little.
In particular I’d like to thank reader Bryon L. Harvey (Butler, Tenn.), who was the first to offer me access to a running installation of Simple Groupware, and Steve Mbah (Vancouver, Wash.), who provided detailed installation notes on how he got the software running as well as an account on his installation.
So, what of Simple Groupware? It is, to say the least, very ambitious. Simple Groupware includes everything plus the kitchen sink and seems well-engineered. It has an incredible number of modules, including calendaring, contacts, notes, files, tasks, spreadsheets, document management, forums, galleries, IMAP, POP, SMTP, WebDAV, SyncML, a portal module, wikis, RSS feeds … the list goes on and on. Along with all of that, Simple Groupware has granular access permissions, localization, its own markup language and APIs.
But along with that huge list comes its core problem: Simple Groupware isn’t actually “simple.” The user interface is the biggest problem, because it doesn’t make that large collection of features easy to understand. A naive user will need a lot of handholding and education to get much out of the system.
So, interesting system, but not what I was looking for.
