RiseVision

Hey everybody, Robb here with a tip on testing your Presentations.

Testing Presentations is all fine and dandy when everything goes well, but in the case that you have a Presentation that is crashing or becoming sluggish after a certain period of time, here are a couple of tests that I do that usually determine the cause.

First, the most obvious thing to make sure of is that your Display hardware is adequate to run the Presentation. If your Presentation has a lot of video, transitions or kinetic Gadgets, you’re going to need a good Processor, video card, and adequate memory. If you have the hardware to back it up, then the issue likely lies in some of the content. This is where Perfmon (Performance Monitor) on Windows comes in extremely handy. I know there are similar performance monitoring tools on Linux and Mac, but for my example, I will only discuss Perfmon.

First, get Perfmon configured correctly. In Windows XP, go to start –> Run –>Perfmon. Once Perfmon starts up, go into Performance Logs and Alerts –> Counter Logs, and start up the “System Overview” monitor. System Overview monitors the stuff we care the most about, CPU, Memory, Disk Activity. Now, just let your Presentation run for 24 – 48 hours, and then stop the System Overview monitor:

Windows Vista and 7 are a bit more complex in setting up the Performance Counter, as the default System Performance monitor tracks every second, which is going to be a LOT of data. In this case, just create your own, and be sure to set the Performance Counter to every minute, not every second:

At the same time, I like to have the Task Manager on top of the Presentation. Even though Perfmon is tracking everything for me, I like to watch the available CPU and Memory. Does the CPU or Memory spike when certain content comes on? Or when a certain interactive feature is touched? Or even just so I can look over at those values throughout the day to see if there is a steady increase. If you see a quick increase, you know you likely have an issue, and instead of having to wait for Perfmon to confirm, you can start testing elements of the Presentation.

Now once you have left Perfmon running for 24 – 48 hours, that is a lot of data, and the best way to tell if you have an issue is to see it in a graph. A quick and easy way to manipulate that data is to export it to CSV, and then open it in Microsoft Excel, and graph the values. This page shows you how to export to CSV from your Perfmon BLG file, and this is an example of what the data looks like when you put it into an Excel graph:

The best way to determine the culprit is to remove until everything works perfectly. Have a lot of Flash? Remove it and see how it runs for 24-48 hours. Lots of Video? Same thing. It’s tedious, but it gets the answer you need.