(no title)
brianwski | 4 years ago
Thanks, that was super exiting for us. After 14 years, I claim (and this is controversial) that we're no longer a startup and now we're just a mid-sized publicly traded company. :-)
> process-based firewalls like Little Snitch, because each copy needs to be configured separately
Yeah, that was actually a surprise and unfortunate. What the Mac architect (one of my business partners) and I think is that now that it is nice and stable, we might go down to 1 or 2 bztrans_thread executables, and one bztransmit. That seems like a better tradeoff where we waste much MUCH less disk space, and it is only 3 executables to allowlist in Little Snitch, and it achieves basically what we want now that it's stable and working well.
Originally there were 10 threads MAXIMUM, and we made 10 copies. And each copy was linking with shared libaries so it was only 10 MBytes of disk space which nobody noticed. Then Windows lost their friggin' minds with one of their releases and forced us to link statically which bloated it way up to 5 or 10 MBytes per executable. Then we went to 20 threads maximum and the whole thing was silly. When we went to 100 threads maximum we said "enough" and went to mod 20 for re-using executable names.
By the way, ALL OF THIS could be avoided if Microsoft and Apple provided an API to set the name displayed in Task Manager/Activity Monitor. Maybe that's a security issue, I don't know. But frankly wouldn't it be SUPER TOTALLY USEFUL if chrome displayed the current web page loaded in the process name of each and every chrome process? Then you would know which one to kill when something goes sideways.
fouc|4 years ago
The problem is process lists should be showing the true state of the computer. It wouldn't be a good idea to hide the actual executable name. But it sounds like it could be useful to add another column for "label", so that threads could set a label and offer more insight on the process list.
brianwski|4 years ago
Yeah, that would work really well. When you look at the "services" control panel in Windows, there are two columns. One column is "Name" of the service, and another column is a longer explanation with the column header "Description". I put a small description in there for bzserv (our service) plus a URL to our company website. I think this is just being polite, customers who don't recognize what "bzserv" is can immediate find more information on it.