Options Tab
The Options tab lets you set a number of option for the program. The
first option is to set the Sample Interval. This is the time between the
sample gathering processes. The time is in seconds. The SETI clients update the
state file about every minute so an interval of thirty seconds will be sure to
catch all the updates. You can pause the sample event by clicking the Pause
button. The progress bar in the status bar at the bottom of the window will stop
indicating that the sampling process has stopped. The Pause button
toggles between Pause and Start. Clicking the Start button will
start the process.
You can also have the program warn you if the sample processes overlap. That
would happen if a a new sample process is started before one of the previous
ones had completed. The cause would be a slow network connection, or the Sample
Interval is set too small and the program can't update that fast. Unselecting
this option disables the warning.
The Time before Client Stall Displayed controls the amount of time the
program waits before it indicates a SETI client has stalled. A client stall can
happen if the state file hasn't changed since the last sample interval, or the
SETI client information can't be read. If you set this too low (below one
minute), the clients will always be stalled, because they only update every
minute or so.
The Sort Options isn't implemented yet. I decided this would be a great
option, but never got around to implementing it. The Clients are sorted by name
if you close with the Save options on exit checked. This is just the
standard, not anything I planned.
The Graphs Use options is the same as the CPU/Real time button. This option
can be set with either control.
- The Real time setting needs at least two samples before it can start
calculating the information it needs to display the graphs. Since the SETI
clients only update every minute or so, it takes a couple of minutes for the
graphs to become active. The real time also interpolates or estimates the
information from the samples it gets. The information can be very inaccurate
until several samples have been gathered. After a while, there is little
difference between the Real Time values and the CPU values if the SETI client is
running all the time. In the client stalls the differences will diverge.
Finally the Save options on exit option will cause the program to save
the current client information when the program exits if checked. The
information saved are all the options, plus the name, color and location of the
SETI clients. Since the program can't monitor what happens when it is not
running, the accumulated time and progress information is not saved.
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