autohotkey script speed & prevent spam click - windows

First question is: Is this script as fast as possible as it can get?
I'm talking about the commands in the start are they necessary/unnecessary? do they help at all when its about simple key remapping?
I would like it to run as fast as possible since I do pretty intense & fast stuff with this script.
The 2nd question is: How to prevent this script from spamclicking?
If I keep "E or R" held down, it will spam click which I do not want it to do.
How to fix this?
#NoEnv
#MaxHotkeysPerInterval 99000000
#HotkeyInterval 99000000
#KeyHistory 0
ListLines Off
Process, Priority, , A
SetBatchLines, -1
SetKeyDelay, -1, -1
SetMouseDelay, -1
SetDefaultMouseSpeed, 0
SetWinDelay, -1
SetControlDelay, -1
SendMode Input
*e::Click
return
*r::Click
return
Ins::Suspend
return

Answer to the second question, add the KeyWait command to your hotkeys, KeyWait - Syntax & Usage | AutoHotkey
*e::
Click
KeyWait, e
return
*r::
Click
KeyWait, r
return

Answer to the first question, it looks like you may have gotten the header lines from here: How to optimize the speed of a script as much as possible. The post explains each line (see below) and even includes some benchmarks for other things.
In your case, if you're only doing simple key remapping, it's probably not worth including any of these lines with exception to SendMode , Input, as that is the most reliable send mode. You mention doing "pretty intense & fast stuff with this script"; what this means exactly will determine if the header lines are necessary.
Notes
1. #NoEnv is recommended for all scripts, it disables environment variables.
2. The default #MaxHotkeysPerInterval along with #HotkeyInterval will stop your script by showing message boxes if you have some kind of rapid autofire loop in it. Just put some insane unreachable high number to ignore this limit.
3. ListLines and #KeyHistory are functions used to "log your keys". Disable them as they're only useful for debugging purposes.
4. Setting an higher priority to a Windows program is supposed to improve its performance. Use AboveNormal/A. If you feel like it's making things worse, comment or remove this line.
5. The default SetBatchLines value makes your script sleep 10 milliseconds every line. Make it -1 to not sleep (but remember to include at least one Sleep in your loops, if any!)
6. Even though SendInput ignores SetKeyDelay, SetMouseDelay and SetDefaultMouseSpeed, having these delays at -1 improves SendEvent's speed just in case SendInput is not available and falls back to SendEvent.
7. SetWinDelay and SetControlDelay may affect performance depending on the script.
8. SendInput is the fastest send method. SendEvent (the default one) is 2nd place, SendPlay a far 3rd place (it's the most compatible one though). SendInput does not obey to SetKeyDelay, SetMouseDelay, SetDefaultMouseSpeed; there is no delay between keystrokes in that mode.
9. If you're not using any SetTimer, the high precision sleep function is useful when you need millisecond reliability in your scripts. It may be problematic when used with SetTimer in some situations because this sleep method pauses the entire script. To make use of it, here's an example that waits 16,67 milliseconds:
DllCall("Sleep",UInt,16.67)
10. When using PixelSearch to scan a single pixel of a single color variation, don't use the Fast parameter. According to my benchmarks, regular PixelSearch is faster than PixelSearch Fast in that case.
11. According to the documentation (this text is found in the setup file), the Unicode x64bit version of AHK is faster, use it when available.

Related

Exit command examples

I want to press a key at any point, causing the simulation to stop without loosing data collected until that point. I don't know how to do the exit command. Can you give me some examples?
I think, WandMaker's comment tells only half of the story.
First, there is no general rule, that Control-C will interrupt your program (see the for instance here), but assume that this works in your case (since it will work in many cases):
If I understand you write, you want to somehow "process" the data collected up to this point. This means that you need to intercept the effect of Control-C (which, IF it works as expected, will make the controlling shell deliver a SIGINT), or that you need to interecept the "exit" (since the default behaviour upon receiving a SIGINT would be to exit the program).
If you want to go along the first path, you need to catch the Interrupt exception; see for example here.
If you want to follow the second route, you need to install an exit handler. Note that it will be called too when the program is exited in the normal way.
If you are unsure, which way is better - and I see no general way to recommend one over the other -, try the first one. There is less chance that you will accidentally ruin something.

Check status of a forked process?

I'm running a process that will take, optimistically, several hours, and in the worst case, probably a couple of days.
I've tried a couple of times to run it and it just never seems to complete (I should add, I didn't write the program, it's just a big dataset). I know my syntax for the command is correct as I use it all the time for smaller data and it works properly (I'll spare you the details as it is obscure for SO and I don't think that relevant to the question).
Consequently, I'd like to leave the program unattended running as a fork with &.
Now, I'm not totally sure whether the process is just grinding to a halt or is running but taking much longer than expected.
Is there any way to check the progress of the process other than ps and top + 1 (to check CPU use).
My only other thought was to get the process to output a logfile and periodically check to see if the logfile has grown in size/content.
As a sidebar, is it necessary to also use nohup with a forked command?
I would use screen for this purpose. see the man for more reference
Brief summary how to use:
screen -S some_session_name - starts a new screen session named session_name
Ctrl + a + d - detach session
screen -r some_session_name returns you to your session

Printing on screen the percentage completed while my tcl script is running?

I have a tcl script which takes a few minutes to run (the execution time varies based on different configurations).
I want the users to have some kind of an idea of whether it's still executing and how long it would take to complete while the script executes.
Some of the ideas I've had so far:
1) Indicate it using ... which keep increasing with each internal command run or so. But again it doesn't really give a sense of how much more to go for a first time user.
2) Use the revolving slash which I've seen used many places.
3) Have an actual percentage completed output on screen. No idea if this is viable or how to go about it.
Does anyone have any ideas on what could be done so that users of the script understand what's going on and how to do this?
Also if I'm implementing it using ... , how do I get them to print the . on the same line each time. If I use puts to do this in the tcl script the . just gets printed on the next line.
And for the revolving slash, I would need to replace something which was already printed on screen. How can I do this with tcl?
First off, the reason you were having problems printing dots was that Tcl was buffering its output, waiting for a new line. That's often a useful behavior (often enough that it's the default) but it isn't wanted in this case so you turn it off with:
fconfigure stdout -buffering none
(The other buffering options are line and full, which offer progressively higher levels of buffering for improved performance but reduced responsiveness.)
Alternatively, do flush stdout after printing a dot. (Or print the dots to stderr, which is unbuffered by default due to mainly being for error messages.)
Doing a spinner isn't much harder than printing dots. The key trick is to use a carriage return (a non-printable character sometimes visualized as ^M) to move the cursor position back to the start of the line. It's nice to factor the spinner code out into a little procedure:
proc spinner {} {
global spinnerIdx
if {[incr spinnerIdx] > 3} {
set spinnerIdx 0
}
set spinnerChars {/ - \\ |}
puts -nonewline "\r[lindex $spinnerChars $spinnerIdx]"
flush stdout
}
Then all you need to do is call spinner regularly. Easy! (Also, print something over the spinner once you've finished; just do puts "\r$theOrdinaryMessage".)
Going all the way to an actual progress meter is nice, and it builds on these techniques, but it requires that you work out how much processing there is to do and so on. A spinner is much easier to implement! (Especially if you've not yet nailed down how much work there is to do.)
The standard output stream is initially line buffered, so you won't see new output until you write a newline character, call flush or close it (which is automatically done when your script exits). You could turn this buffering off with...
fconfigure stdout -buffering none
...but diagnostics, errors, messages, progress etc should really be written to the stderr stream instead. It has buffering set to none by default so you won't need fconfigure.

how to stop a running script in Matlab [duplicate]

This question already has an answer here:
How to abort a running program in MATLAB?
(1 answer)
Closed 7 years ago.
I write a long running script in Matlab, e.g.
tic;
d = rand(5000);
[a,b,c] = svd(d);
toc;
It seems running forever. Becasue I press F5 in the editor window. So I cannot press C-Break to stop in the Matlab console.
I just want to know how to stop the script. I am current use Task Manager to kill Matlab, which is really silly.
Thanks.
Matlab help says this-
For M-files that run a long time, or that call built-ins or MEX-files that run a long time, Ctrl+C does not always effectively stop execution. Typically, this happens on Microsoft Windows platforms rather than UNIX[1] platforms. If you experience this problem, you can help MATLAB break execution by including a drawnow, pause, or getframe function in your M-file, for example, within a large loop. Note that Ctrl+C might be less responsive if you started MATLAB with the -nodesktop option.
So I don't think any option exist. This happens with many matlab functions that are complex. Either we have to wait or don't use them!.
If ctrl+c doesn't respond right away because your script is too long/complex, hold it.
The break command doesn't run when matlab is executing some of its deeper scripts, and either it won't log a ctrl sequence in the buffer, or it clears the buffer just before or just after it completes those pieces of code. In either case, when matlab returns to execute more of your script, it will recognize that you are holding ctrl+c and terminate.
For longer running programs, I usually try to find a good place to provide a status update and I always accompany that with some measure of time using tic and toc. Depending on what I am doing, I might use run time, segment time, some kind of average, etc...
For really long running programs, I found this to be exceptionally useful
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/16649-send-text-message-to-cell-phone/content/send_text_message.m
but it looks like they have some newer functions for this too.
MATLAB doesn't respond to Ctrl-C while executing a mex implemented function such as svd. Also when MATLAB is allocating big chunk of memory it doesn't respond. A good practice is to always run your functions for small amount of data, and when all test passes run it for actual scale. When time is an issue, you would want to analyze how much time each segment of code runs as well as their rough time complexity.
Consider having multiple matlab sessions. Keep the main session window (the pretty one with all the colours, file manager, command history, workspace, editor etc.) for running stuff that you know will terminate.
Stuff that you are experimenting with, say you are messing with ode suite and you get lots of warnings: matrix singular, because you altered some parameter and didn't predict what would happen, run in a separate session:
dos('matlab -automation -r &')
You can kill that without having to restart the whole of Matlab.
One solution I adopted--for use with java code, but the concept is the same with mexFunctions, just messier--is to return a FutureValue and then loop while FutureValue.finished() or whatever returns true. The actual code executes in another thread/process. Wrapping a try,catch around that and a FutureValue.cancel() in the catch block works for me.
In the case of mex functions, you will need to return somesort of pointer (as an int) that points to a struct/object that has all the data you need (native thread handler, bool for complete etc). In the case of a built in mexFunction, your mexFunction will most likely need to call that mexFunction in the separate thread. Mex functions are just DLLs/shared objects after all.
PseudoCode
FV = mexLongProcessInAnotherThread();
try
while ~mexIsDone(FV);
java.lang.Thread.sleep(100); %pause has a memory leak
drawnow; %allow stdout/err from mex to display in command window
end
catch
mexCancel(FV);
end
Since you mentioned Task Manager, I'll guess you're using Windows. Assuming you're running your script within the editor, if you aren't opposed to quitting the editor at the same time as quitting the running program, the keyboard shortcut to end a process is:
Alt + F4
(By which I mean press the 'Alt' and 'F4' keys on your keyboard simultaneously.)
Alternatively, as mentioned in other answers,
Ctrl + C
should also work, but will not quit the editor.
if you are running your matlab on linux, you can terminate the matlab by command in linux consule.
first you should find the PID number of matlab by this code:
top
then you can use this code to kill matlab:
kill
example:
kill 58056
To add on:
you can insert a time check within a loop with intensive or possible deadlock, ie.
:
section_toc_conditionalBreakOff;
:
where within this section
if (toc > timeRequiredToBreakOff) % time conditional break off
return;
% other options may be:
% 1. display intermediate values with pause;
% 2. exit; % in some cases, extreme : kill/ quit matlab
end

(MS-DOS) Time Delays

I came past a few ways to cause a time delay such as pings and dirs. Though none of them are really precise, is there anny proper way to cause a time delay?
I heard about a few things though they don't work on all computers, not on my Windows XP nor the Windows NT at college.
It takes ages going through all files on Google finding a good answer, and since I didn't yet find the question on Stack Overflow I thought it might be good to just create the question myself ;)
Sleep
It will allow you to do this.
<warning>This is a hack</warning>
Use your favorite programming language (other than MS-DOS batch) and create an application which takes one argument, the number of milliseconds to wait, then, simply call this program from a batch file to sleep the required amount.
As far as I know, this is the only reliable way to do it in DOS.
If you don't have the ability to send another program along with the batch file, use DEBUG to write a sleep command on the fly, and execute it.
EDIT:
The above answer was kind of toungue-in-cheek. I wouldn't run a batch file that had some DEBUG trickery in it. I believe the traditional way to use a delay in a batch file is the CHOICE commad.
type nul|choice /c:y /t:y,nn > nul
Which of course, doesn't work in XP, since that would be WAAYY too convenient.
"...proper way...."
you can't do that in DOS.
It is possible to achieve a precision of a few miliseconds, depending on your machine's speed.
I have just finished creating such a batch, and though I won't share with you the actual code, I'll give you some pointers:
Use %time% variable, and devide into substrings (without ":" and ".") - one substring will get the seconds, the other - minutes (you may add hours, for delays of over an hour, and even incorporate the date)
Use set /A to transform the time variables into 1 integer representing the amount of seconds which have passed since a rounded hour (X:00:00.00). Add the inputed delay (in seconds) to that.
Create a short loop, comparing the value of the combined var (explained in section 2) to the current time (need to recalc the curent combined min+sec value, inside this loop), and exiting the loop when the match is true.
One major bugfix here - you'll need to truncate any preceeding zeros to variables which are about to get evaluated in a "set /A" command. I've noticed that the console's evaluator (for this command) returns an error when an integer with a preceeding 08 or 09 (or simply 08 or 09) is used.
Remark:
This will only work with command extensions enabled. To test it, use the following at the beginning of the routine:
verify other 2>nul
setlocal enableextensions
if errorlevel 1 goto err
And then add an error handler subroutine named "err".
If you'd want to continue your batch in the same file, use "endlocal" after the looping subroutine.
BTW, this applies ONLY to Windows XP service pack 2 or 3.

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