Constant high CPU usage by Sandman

Mr.X

Member
Staff member
Sandboxie-Plus 1.17.1
Windows 10 x64

After fiddling a bit with Box Options - Appearance - Sandbox indicator. I had to uninstall it.

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There appear to be conditions where this happens. "Don't alter the window title" and "Don't show in border" (with "Show only when title is in focus") makes it draw the border, stay at 25% CPU and if I move the window the border stays where the window had been. If I switch to "Show above..." or "Show within..." (the others stay the same) everything works as expected.

It appears to be related to "Don't show in border", since it does not make a difference if I use the symbol, or have it display the name of the sandbox in the title. As long as "Don't show in border" is not used, it works. And when it is used, it shows the behavior.
 
I think it's fixed now.

Btw I noticed SandMan a 1.1% CPU usage on both 1.17.2 and 1.16.9, the latter is the one I've been using. Is that normal for SandMan?
Well, to be honest, CPU usage varies between 0.5 and 1.1 or 1.2 percent.
1.17.2
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1.16.9
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I noticed SandMan a 1.1% CPU usage on both 1.17.2 and 1.16.9, the latter is the one I've been using. Is that normal for SandMan?

Might depend on what it is doing. When just being idle and nothing is sandboxed, I now looked into what it takes for me. At that stage it is around 0 to 0.8%, mostly not going past 0.5%

When something is run in a sandbox, the numbers down change much. Occasionally it goes to 1%, but not often and not for long. When I move a window around where SandMan is drawing a border to it, the CPU usage increases to something over 1% (up to 2%) and falls back to something below 1%, when I stop moving the window around.

Previously I had not really looked at how much CPU was being used, only when it was doing some sandbox operations, like deleting sandboxed files, I knew it was higher.

Most of the time it should be something around 0.0% to 0.5%, going to say around 2% when it does something for a short period of time and then return to "normal".

That's just what I observed, not what I know it should be, as I don't know how much is expected to be used.
 
Yes, I use overlay icons extracted by sandman.exe from the main program.exe of an application. I've got 34 boxes with this setup, only 3 to 7 apps running simultaneously, though.
 
In that case, it was reading 34 application icons from disk every second while the GUI was open; this will be fixed in the next version. There were two performance-related fixes: one addressing the icon checks and the other related to border handling. After these changes, you should see a noticeable reduction in CPU usage.
 
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You're right, CPU usage will never be zero due to background box and process polling. Even when the SandMan UI is hidden or minimized, some usage will still occur. Keep in mind that adjusting polling rates can reduce CPU usage, but it may also introduce unintended side effects.
 
Today it's even lower than 0.09 % CPU usage. Don't know why; I guess it had something to do with restarting the machine, who knows. This thing is excellent news! I'm excited now!
 
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