Once again thanks to Dr Conway, this interesting image was produced.
http://www.galkam.com.au/MemoryUsageComparison.jpg
This graphic shows the Windows Task manager displaying Memory usage.
Dr Conway is a Paediatrician who has just about every health message downloader in Australia running on his laptop.
This includes :
- HealthLink
- Medical Objects
- Fetch (Sonic)
- 2 Hippo
- eClinic (Gribbles/VCS)
- miLink (Radiology
- MQLink (Symbion)
- Argus (not running at the time of the test).
and of course
- Alltalk (with AVP)
We brought up the Task Manager and sorted by Memory Usage:
The 3 biggest memory users on the system were 3 of the downloaders! Medical Objects topping the list at 52MB followed by Health link (30MB) and Fetch (26MB). Argus was not running at the time of the test. I ran Argus Agent on my system and found that it uses 27MB (not counting the Firebird DB instance) so it ranks at least in the top 3. For Medical Objects at least, the Backend Database is likely to be one of the Service Host applications (a database instance) and representing yet more usage.
AllTalk ranked lowest memory user < 2.5MB and its interesting to note that MQLink uses 5.3MB just for maintenance (scheduler and cleanup), not including the actual send/receive process which was not running at the time of the comparison.
| App | Memory Usage(MB) | Ranking | % of Memory Used* |
| Alltalk | 2372 | 1 | 1.25 |
| MQLink (management only) | 5288 | 2 | 2.78 |
| miLink | 5460 | 3 | 2.87 |
| Alltalk Virtual Printer | 7428 | 4 | 3.90 |
| eClinic | 15748 | 5 | 8.27 |
| 2Hippo | 17388 | 6 | 9.13 |
| Fetch | 26176 | 7 | 13.74 |
| Argus Agent | 27816 | 8 | 14.61 |
| Health Link | 30044 | 9 | 15.78 |
| Medical Objects | 52728 | 10 | 27.69 |
| Total | 190448 |
Note: memory used referrs to Memory used just for downloaders
AVP came in at 7.5 MB by itself so considering AVP + Alltalk together this comes to 9.8MB. Even still Alltalk+AVP ranks ranks 2 after miLink (excluding MQLink because the transfer agent was not included). I am not familiar with miLink (nothing found on a google search) but Dr Conway reports that its a radiology downloader. However, it does not support mulitple profiles: IE you must install it multiple times with multiple instances for each provider.
Once again, we emphasise that the major Goals of AllTalk are:
a) Small Footprint and Overhead
b) ease of Installation
c) Speed, Stability and Portability (remember it still works on Win 95!)
d) Advanced functionality including Integration with practice software.
This comparison demonstrates that Alltalk does indeed live up to our expectations using at between 1/22 and 1/12 the memory of the major competitors with similar functionality.
We may soon have figures on CPU time statistics.
Glen.
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