running on JBW 2.1.3pre1 – much better now, everything responding seem normal speed now. :)

I searched intensely for a download for the latest JBW release – in this case 2.1.3pre1 – but had no success. Can anyone post a link please?

there’s even a pre2 available for download here:
http://www.jbidwatcher.com/download/JBidwatcher-2.1.3pre2.exe

Cheers,
Egika

Thanks for the link!
Sniping works now :)

Many thanks for the link to pre2 Egika! ^_
It seems to take care of both issues: 100% cpu load and failing to snipe.

My JBidWatcher took its own sweet time announcing the update, but I too find if the list has a LOT of items in it (I have a lot of items in my current and completed tabs) and it idles at 100% CPU after I updated JBidWatcher from 2.1.pre6 to 2.1.2. If I switch to the “selling” tab, the CPU idles back to normal, but still noticeably higher than 2.1pre6 did.

This is JBidWatcher 2.1.2 on MacOS X 10.4.11.

Is there any way I can get access to 2.1.3pre2 for OS X?

I also have high CPU usage using intel core2duo machine on Mac OS X with JBW 2.1.3pre2

I tested it on a Corei5 MacBook Pro 17, and the CPU usage is low, because the processor is much faster and runs cooler.

I do notice that if you load up lots of items, in the (My eBay) tab or (current) tabs, you will see high CPU usage. I deleted (lots of wait) most of them, and it’s doing fine with less items in watch and I believe it has something to do with the way how java had been updated from Apple lately.

I would suggest you to eliminate anything (old) listings you don’t need, or have other means of archiving them, then delete them from your JBW tabs.

Drag or load up only those you would be sniping in the next week or so, if you are dealing with hundreds of them.

I found JBW slows to crawl when I load up 600 items of iPhones for sale from simply dragging them into JBW from my browser.

You can try JBW 2.1.3pre2 here:
http://www.jbidwatcher.com/download/JBidwatcher-2.1.3pre2.dmg

Yeah, my Mac is slow – it’s still a PowerBook G4!

2.1.3pre2 does, however, take a little less CPU than 2.1.2 did. I might just revert back to 2.1pre6 that I have on a backup disk.

Yeah, I could clean out my lists, but it’s much more convenient to have them all in JBidWatcher than everywhere else – use it for item research and everything.

I’ll give this version a go for a few days to see how it goes. I’ll just have to find where the backup of my 2.1pre6 is hidden.

I usually use a 2.66Ghz Intel Core2Duo iMac, and CPU will run all the way up to 100% continuously with JBW2.1.2 or 2.1.3 AFTER the recent Apple Java update. Memory usage also keeps rising.

Not responsive at all on whatever I want to do with JBW such as switch tabs or selecting auctions to multi-snipe etc. I frequently needs to QUIT JBW and relaunch and get some control back, so I can manage my list and then i will let it just run by itself to snipe. Sometimes JBW is so tied up with whatever updating or things it’s doing, it will take so many minutes and still won’t quit, so I just Force Quit and re-launch.

As I said, I even tried on a Intel Corei5 machine, with load of fast RAM and it is still showing sign of non-responsiveness, but under ACTIVITY MONITOR, it hogs much less CPU% as that machine is much faster.

Loading up 600 new items to try is just to test, but that really put JBW to crawling speed. It would be interesting to do that again and set JBW to snipe on everyone of them. Incidentally, I never won any snipe on any of those iPhone snipes, those darn things just go for so much even on those that’s not working, As-Is listing…. :D

Try 2.1.3pre2, it seems to work better than any other versions I had before. Let me know if you want the older version back, I do keep a few of them still. Good luck, and don’t be sniping on my items now :).

Greetings,
@zappram (and anybody else), if you tweak the URL above (2.1.3pre2) to have a 3 at the end instead of a 2, you’ll get a version where I’ve tweaked the performance some.

I’ve tried to address the inner loops that I could find, and it definitely improved performance, but on my system (2.8Ghz Core 2 Duo) it stays steady at about 5% CPU usage. Now the actual performance is going to be very affected by the makeup of the listings you’re monitoring, how many are active, updating, etc., at any given time, so it’s very hard for me to predict how it will behave on your system.

http://www.jbidwatcher.com/download/JBidwatcher-2.1.3pre3.dmg

Replace the ‘dmg’ with ‘exe’ for windows, or ‘jar’ for Linux, and have a go, and let me know if the performance is any better.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

JBW2.1.3pre3-1-g8b26d9f seems to work much better for me. At least it’s responding when I click and switch tabs now. It was so laggy before. I will keep testing and perhaps I will load up hundred of new listings and snipe like no tomorrow :D and see what it will do then.

JBW2.1.3pre3-1-g8b26d9f

- loaded up 300+ new listings (dragged from ebay site page after search), at first, no immediate response, but they work if you select-all (Command-A), and drag the entire page into JBW.

- then click to select sort by name, price, seller, etc. and seem snappy (very happy about that).

- weed out those listings that I don’t want to

- multi-select lots of them to (snipe), not (multi-snipe) because i want to win more items at the price I want to pay.

So, lets see if they all will snipe accordingly in the next few days. :) I wish I win lots of them (at the price I want to pay).

So far, so good, I like it a lot more than the older version as it is responding well. I can select all different tabs without delay like before. II like it. :D I will post more if I have more findings later.

Thanks a lot Morgan :) Keep up the great work.

…wow, feels much better now with 2.1.3pre3-1-g8b26d9f on MacOSX 10.4.11 2×1,3GHz G4 with 1,5GB RAM.
CPU use is getting down to <10% after the startup periode, menu and right click doesn’t force me to wait for minutes as in 2.1.3pre1.
Pic popups are responsive again.
After 4 Minutes physical ram use is still slowly climbing up (now 209 MB) and responsiveness is suffering a lot when switching from current to complete or any other folder (even when switch back and forth seconds ago) , rushing up to >80% CPU use while doing that ….

But it is a great relief auctions can be changed and shown again now without waiting!!

THanx Morgan!!

Some quick feedback on 2.1.3-pre3:

I have about 100 active auctions, and about 4000 “completed” auctions, both mostly from importing “My eBay” watchlists (and dating back to 2005). I use the Java version on Linux, via an X11/VNC display.
Version 2.1.3-pre3 indeed fixes a major issue: the GUI is finally snappy to use again, with a really low CPU load (ca. 20% “of 200%” on a dual-CPU system).

Even though I have found JBidWatcher to be very reliable for auction sniping, the 2.1.3-pre3 changes will be a great help to make the eBay portion of Christmas shopping even more convenient and time-saving. ;-)
I’m planning to send you another (small) donation during the next couple of weeks.

Many thanks, Morgan, for this great piece of software, and also for the CC-style license!

PS: Is it technically necessary to have all of the old (completed) auctions in RAM?
Would anything break if it were possibe to disable the loading of old auctions (temporarily) at start-up?

Greetings,
@in_de – Thanks for the feedback! It’s sounding more and more like I should push this out as a 2.1.3…

Is it technically necessary to have all of the old (completed) auctions in RAM?

No; the whole idea behind going to a database-backed system is that I don’t need to have items in memory that aren’t being actively displayed. This means that when switching between tabs, for example, it would load up the listings that are in that tab. Probably incurring a slight pause, but it should be much less than an equivalent web app would, for instance.

However, this is not how JBidwatcher was originally architected, so it’s a TON of work to make it behave well in a circumstance where it doesn’t have all the listings in memory. For example, I had heavily optimized the ‘next listing to update’ code, so it was constant time using a min-priority heap, using the ‘next update time’ as the priority, and peeking at it until it was time. That’s FAST. For 2.1.2, I threw out that very efficient code, because it required keeping all listings in memory in order to build and maintain the min-heap. Instead JBidwatcher now retrieves the next auction to update using rules (SQL) from the database, relying on the DB to be reasonably efficient. I didn’t do the initial SQL lookup code very efficiently, so improving that was one of the changes that made 2.1.3pre3 faster.

I still have some code that expects everything to be current in memory; it’s probably going to be a few releases before I can eliminate all of that, but it’s getting better… Slowly, I admit, and not transparently, but it IS getting better. I’m working on optimizing to reduce memory, while keeping performance at least acceptable. I failed on the last part, evidently, but that’s what 2.1.3 is for. :)

Best of luck with your auctions!

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Greetings,
And just to clarify, you might have noticed that I changed the home page and added a badge for ‘YourKit Java Profiler’; that’s what I’ve been using to find performance problems in JBidwatcher. I grabbed their ‘14 day trial’ version, and used it to dig into JBidwatcher’s performance. After reporting a few bugs to them and chatting about my project, they offered me an ‘Open Source’ license in exchange for that little bit of publicity.

Given that the things I found with YourKit made a clear difference in performance to folks who were having problems, and that having a license means I can run it anytime I want, not just in a 14 day trial, I was quite happy to give them that publicity.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

I downloaded 2.1.3pre3 and changed the .dmg to .jar as instructed above. I tried to run in a terminal and got the following error:

bill@computer3:~$ java -Xmx512m -jar JBidwatcher-2.1.3pre3.jar
Invalid or corrupt jarfile JBidwatcher-2.1.3pre3.jar

I deleted the file and redownloaded it but got the same error. 2.1.2 doesn’t work for me because of the FP problem noted elsewhere. Any help would be appreciated.

java version “1.6.0_22”
Java™ SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_22-b04)
Java HotSpot™ Server VM (build 17.1-b03, mixed mode)

Greetings,
@habana – Your order of operations is wrong; change the .dmg to .jar in the URL, and download THAT file. Don’t download the .dmg and rename it to .jar, that won’t work.

Bleh. What I meant was to put this in as your URL for Linux: http://www.jbidwatcher.com/download/JBidwatcher-2.1.3pre3.jar

I didn’t want to do the work for folks, because it’s a pre-release, and I worry that folks who aren’t comfortable tweaking the URL also won’t be willing to give the feedback I need in order to determine whether it’s working well enough to push it as a new release. Also, it’s a pain to put the whole platform list with links in whenever I talk about the pre-release, so I generally don’t bother. However, I didn’t expect the instructions would be misread; sorry about that.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Hi Morgan
Thanks for that – I thought it would be something simple! I fully understand your position on a pre-release – I wouldn’t normally look for one but was frustrated by the latest ebay changes. All working OK now and time to see if I can snipe again!

No apology needed and thanks again.

Hi Morgan!
I’m already on JBidwatcher 2.1.3 (Win XP Pro 5.1.2600).
I installed Java Runtime Update 23 (build 1.6.0_23-b05) yesterday, the heavy CPU load problem seems to be solved now.
1. There is another issue I spotted: I’m not able to move auctions to my custom tabs (‘won’, ‘not won’) anymore, the dropdown list appearing when trying to ‘send to [tab]’ simply doesn’t show them.
2. Some of the won auction items have still been shown as (FP) after moving to 2.1.3.
MERRY CHRISTMAS! ^ _ ^
Valentin

Wow, I am IMPRESSED.

I just got the alert to update today, and decided to try it out. Even on my underpowered (PowerBook G4) system, after initializing it promptly dropped back to where it used to be on 2.1pre6. Switching between tabs is fast (especially going to the Completed tab) and everything seems good.

I still have 2.1pre6 around but I’ll let 2.1.3 run a little bit to see how it goes long-term. Alas my massive current tab is down to half, but completed is a good test.

What a great Christmas present!

MERRY CHRISTMAS ALL!

After a day, switching tabs from current to completed pauses momentarily,pegs the CPU, but it then returns back to normal. In my huge list of auctions, it takes roughly 20 seconds to do so.

I can live with that – the CPU isn’t pegged at 100% all the time and when switching tabs, the delay isn’t unreasonably long.

What a great present!

Yes, me happy 2 :D with everything working and I am just winning too much :)

Everything works perfectly EXCEPT … once anyone bid on my auction items, the item will be moved automatically from “Selling” tab to “My eBay” tab. But-It-Now listings will stay in “Selling” tab even if someone bought any from the multiple quantity listing. Weird, but I can deal with it and just need to find it from the “Ma eBay” tab.

• Mac OS X, 10.5 and 10.6, JBidwatcher (2.1.3-0-g0b6c09f)

Happy Holidays!!