Hi @jsmorley,
Just wanted to drop back and give an update. I re-read my post and realised it sounded like I'd created this skin mostly myself - just wanted to correct that and say 99% of the work was already done here by this generous poster:
https://forum.rainmeter.net/viewtopic.php?t=17876
Even after your thoughts I was still having problems. The skin would seem to work fine initially then stop working until I manually refreshed it. I think I've found the problem. It's to do with my DNS setup. I was using local hostnames as the destinations. Due to a probably not best practice, I didn't have the hostnames reserved in DNS. So polling a server that wasn't online didn't result in zero returned packets - it resulted in "Ping request could not find host" which I suspect the Ping Plugin doesn't quite like. Maybe it takes too long to get a result or didn't know how to handle the results it got. I found this by switching to IP addresses instead of hostnames. I plan to fix this properly in DNS with hostname reservations so the DNS still resolves for hostnames, even if they're not online.
Thanks for your help!
Just wanted to drop back and give an update. I re-read my post and realised it sounded like I'd created this skin mostly myself - just wanted to correct that and say 99% of the work was already done here by this generous poster:
https://forum.rainmeter.net/viewtopic.php?t=17876
Even after your thoughts I was still having problems. The skin would seem to work fine initially then stop working until I manually refreshed it. I think I've found the problem. It's to do with my DNS setup. I was using local hostnames as the destinations. Due to a probably not best practice, I didn't have the hostnames reserved in DNS. So polling a server that wasn't online didn't result in zero returned packets - it resulted in "Ping request could not find host" which I suspect the Ping Plugin doesn't quite like. Maybe it takes too long to get a result or didn't know how to handle the results it got. I found this by switching to IP addresses instead of hostnames. I plan to fix this properly in DNS with hostname reservations so the DNS still resolves for hostnames, even if they're not online.
Thanks for your help!
I really would suggest changing Update to 1000 and all UpdateRate to say 10. Then save the skin and restart Rainmeter entirely.
With an Update of 1, and an UpdateRate of 1, you are telling the ping measure to go out to the the 6 sites once a millisecond. This is basically bringing Rainmeter to its knees and within a couple of seconds hanging the measure(s) and then crashing. Rainmeter, or any other process, cannot possibly stay ahead of any requests that are attempting to happen once a millisecond. That is a guaranteed recipe for hanging/crashing Rainmeter.
You are telling it to do so 1000 times a second.
The very lowest practical value for Update is 16. Never use anything less than that, and in general, never less than 1000 unless A) your skin really needs it, and B) you know what you are doing.
Statistics: Posted by osullin — Yesterday, 1:19 pm — Replies 4 — Views 262