Patrick's questions

I originally asked this question on StackOverflow, but as there came no answers, and this question is more about how to configure a server, this question might be more suited on ServerFault.

I have some applications that I start with the Windows START command. With the option /AFFINITY I force the processes on all cores of a Numa node. I want to include some load-balancing logic (so that e.g. the first application is started on node 0, the next on node 1, the next again on node 0).

Additional elements:

• I don't want to move processes from one Numa node to another, so dynamically changing the process affinity mask is not needed.
• I want to keep track of all running processes, so that I can correctly balance newly started processes.
• I want to add a kind of weight to the process (I have heavy processes and light processes) so that I can schedule multiple light processes on the same node, but spread heavy processes over the different Numa nodes

Writing this logic myself is not that hard (some central server application can simply track all started processes), but I was wondering if such software maybe already exists. Load balancing over different computers is not needed.

Does this kind of software already exists? Or is it better to simply write this myself?

In my code, if something terribly goes wrong, I write something in the event log (using the ReportEvent function). For those entries, I get a user-id in the event log entry (5th argument of ReportEvent functions).

For lots of other entries (from other applications or from Windows itself), the user field is shown as "N/A".

The problem is that Windows also adds entries for my application by itself, especially:

• if the application shows a MesssageBox (with MB_TASKMODAL flag). The Event log shows an entry with source "Application Popup".
• if my application is busy and not responding immediately. The Event log shows an entry with source "Application Hang".

Why doesn't Windows show a User Name or User SID in the event log entries? Why is it "N/A" most of the times? Is there any way I can force Windows to use a User Name or SID in the Windows-generated event log entries?

Thanks, Patrick

On some of our systems, Event Viewer shows a human-readable user name for the Event Log entries.

On other systems, Event Viewer shows an SID (in the form S-1-5-...).

Luckily, the SysInternals utility PSGETSID can be used to translate one to the other, but why is the user shown in different formats on the different systems?

It doesn't seem to be OS-specific, since we have two 64-bit Windows 7 systems that show the user differently (one shows the username, the other shows the SID).

Is this caused by security? Do you need a specific security right to be able to see the username in the Event Viewer?

My application is quite interactive application with lots of colors and drag-and-drop functionality, but no fancy 3D-stuff or animations or video, so I only used plain GDI (no GDI Plus, No DirectX).

In the past my applications ran in desktops or laptops, and I suggested my customers to invest in a decent video card, with:

• a minimum resolution of 1280x1024
• a minimum color depth of 24 pixels
• X Megabytes of memory on the video card

Now my users are switching more and more to terminal servers, therefore my question:

What is the importance of a video card on a terminal server?

• Is a video card needed anyway on the terminal server?
• If it is, is the resolution of the remote desktop client limited to the resolutions supported by the video card on the server?
• Can the choice of a video card in the server influence the performance of the applications running on the terminal server (but shown on a desktop PC)?
• If I start to make use of graphical libraries (like Qt) or things like DirectX, will this then have an influence on the choice of video card on the terminal server?
• Are calculations in that case 'offloaded' to the video card? Even on the terminal server?

Thanks.

I have rather big executables (about 25-35 MB). Because I want my users to easily execute my application, I don't want them to install a bunch of DLL's, just xcopy-install is OK for me (and my customers). Because my software is often run from a network drive, and my customers' networks are not always reliable, I link my executables using the /SWAPRUN:NET option. This guarantees that the whole EXE is loaded in memory before the application starts, and prevents crashes if the network connection is dropped while my application is running.

This worked fine so far, BUT ... under Windows Vista, if a network folder has lots of such executables (10, 50, 100, ...) then opening this folder in the Windows explorer takes a lot of time (minutes!). Especially, the visualization of the executables' icons takes a lot of time. This problem did not appear on Windows XP.

Today, I found out that the problem is caused by the /SWAPRUN:NET option. If I remove this linker option (or disable this flag with EDITBIN), than the Vista Windows explorer immediately shows all icons. Disabling this flag is not really an option (see reasons above).

Is there another way to tell Vista that it should not load the complete executable file if it only needs to show the icon (or other version information) in the explorer?