NOTE FOR THE EXTREMELY IMPATIENT, BUT NONETHELESS EXPERIENCED MAC USER:
If you know what you're doing, you can probably figure out how to use Serial of Champions by playing around in the usual fashion. Balloon help is available for you System 7.0.x and above users. You should note, however, that Serial of Champions won't do a darn thing until you tell it what ports and applications to monitor, so there!
AN IMPORTANT NOTE FOR EVERYONE:
The GROSS byte counts and GROSS time values that Serial of Champions gathers are objective and reliable. The "how much time was spent waiting on the remote computer" and "how much time was spent waiting for the local computer" statistics ARE ESTIMATES made using a proprietary empirical algorithm which has been tested with most popular communications applications. These statistics have value only when you are comparing one situation to another using Serial of Champions and differences of a few percent between situational statistics are not significant. Which is to say that insignificant differences are not significant. There are a few communications situations where applying the algorithm does not make sense and when it detects these, it replaces the statistics with "NA" (not applicable).
Okay? So let's continue...
What it does...
As I said above, Serial of Champions watches your serial ports when you are using communications applications and tells you how your communications time is being spent. It can tell you how much time was spent waiting on responses from the remote computer, how much time was spent waiting on your Macintosh (or you), how much time was actually spent sending data and receiving data (plus a few other statistics of interest).
With this information you can:
- compare file transfer methods to see which is the most efficient
- compare communications applications
- compare different communications setups (modems, speeds, types of Macs,etc)
- determine the best time of day to dial into your favorite network
- determine the _worst_ time of day to dial into your favorite network
- determine the effects of adding certain types of System Extensions on the
efficiency of your communications
- determine the effects of doing different kinds of foreground processing when
your communications is being done in a background session.
- And Much Much More! (which means I can't think of anything else that is easily
stated, but I'm sure you galactic scale intelligent users will think of things
"Humble Old Me"™ couldn't)
NOTE: Although it may work, Serial of Champions was not designed to work with "INIT" level serial communications such as fax software and "network" software such as AppleTalk Remote Access. The types of protocols this class of software uses make some of the numbers ("Local" and "Remote" times) Serial of Champions fairly meaningless under many situations. Also, their operation can be, ummm, shakey at times anyway, without throwing in the additional complexity of Serial of Champions.
What's in the package...
The Serial of Champions package consists of this document, a System Extension file (Serial of Champions INIT) and an application file (Serial of Champions). The Extension monitors your serial ports and the application lets you view the information gathered by the Extension as well as configure Serial of Champions.
Installation and Configuration...
To install Serial of Champions, first place the file Serial of Champions INIT" in your System Folder. If you are running System 7.0.x or above, the Finder will ask you if it is OK to put the Extension in the Extensions Folder and you should allow it to do so. Next, place the Serial of Champions application file anywhere you like (I keep all of my applications' folders in a folder called "Applications" but each to her/his own).
Before Serial of Champions will actually _do_ anything, you must do two more things:
• restart your Mac to let the Extension install
• tell Serial of Champions which applications and ports you want it to
monitor using the Serial of Champions application
You can do these in any order and you can change your Serial of Champions configuration at any subsequent time without restarting.
To configure Serial of Champions, launch the Serial of Champions application by double-clicking on the application file from the Finder (or use any other method you are used to). After it's all launched and everything, you can select the "Configure" item from the "Prefs" menu up there on the menu bar. The application shows you its configuration dialog box which lets you add/delete items from the "Ports" and "Apps" lists (you select which one using the appropriately labelled "View List" radio buttons just to the right of the list box). Both lists start out empty (Serial of Champions monitoring nothing very closely) so you need to add things to them.
First, add the port or ports you wish to monitor by clicking the "Add" button. You will see a dialog which lets you pick either the Printer or Modem ports. Double-click on the one you want (probably the Modem port) or select it and click the "Select" button. Repeat this if you wish to monitor both ports.
Next, add the applications that you want Serial of Champions to monitor. You do this by first clicking the "Apps" radio button to select the Applications list and then click the "Add" button. The "Add" button will show you a standard File selection dialog which you can use to navigate to and select an application file in the usual manner. You can repeat this for each communications application that you want Serial of Champions to monitor.
You have now set up Serial of Champions to monitor one or more ports and one or most applications.
The other two configurable items on the Configuration dialog are "Status Refresh Delay" and the "Forced Bps Rate". You can just leave the "Status Refresh Delay" at its default value of 4 seconds.
You only need to set the "Forced Bps Rate" item if you let your Mac communicate with your modem at a different rate than that the modem uses to talk to the remote modem (you know who you are). For example, for purposes of self abuse, I sometimes configure my Mac to talk to my modem at 9600 bps even though my modem talks to other modems at 2400bps. When I do this, I need to tell Serial of Champions that I am doing a weird thing so that it can calculate its statistics using the "right" bits-per-second rate by setting the "Forced Bps Rate" to 2400. Don't worry about it. You probably aren't doing this anyway, I just feel compelled to try to explain the issue.
Anyway, click the "Save" button when you are through diddling with your Ports and Apps lists. Your configuration changes always take immediate effect if the Serial of Champions INIT has been installed.
What the Serial of Champions Extension does...
The Serial of Champions extension watches for the applications you have specified to "open" the serial ports you have specified (this usually happens either when the application is launched or when you start a communications session using the application). When this happens, Serial of Champions starts a "session" for the application/port and starts accumulating statistics. This accumulation continues until the port is closed (which happens either when you quit the application or you quit your communications session) at which time Serial of Champions writes the statistics to its default log file (titled "Serial of Champions Session Log" and kept in your Preferences folder in the System folder).
The Serial of Champions Application
Using the Serial of Champions application, you can:
- view session log file session records
- view the statistics of sessions which are currently in-progress
- save intermediate session statistics of a currently in-progress session
to the default session log file
- reset the statistics of a currently in-progress session to initial values
- freeze the display of currently in-progress session statistics
- turn Serial of Champions monitoring off and back on
To view the default Serial of Champions Session Log, simply launch the application and select the "Current Log" item in the "Windows" menu. You will see a window titled "Serial of Champions Session Log" displaying the last (most recent) entry in the default log file. The window has a button which lets you select between a "Detailed" view of the statistics (showing more technical information) and a "brief" (showing less information) view of the statistics. The scroll bars let you move through the log file to look at any session record. Holding down the command key and pressing the up-arrow moves you to the beginning of the log file (the oldest record in the log). Holding down the command key and pressing the "down arrow" key moves you to the end of the log file (the most recent record in the log).To view a currently in-progress session, select the name of the port from the "Windows" menu. This menu will only have entries for ports which you have asked Serial of Champions to monitor and are currently in-use by applications you have asked Serial of Champions to monitor. Each "Status" window also has a button which lets you select between a "Detailed" view of the statistics (showing more technical information) and a "brief" (showing less information) view of the statistics.
"Brief" view:
"Details" view":
To save the current statistics state of an in-progress session to the default log file, select the "Snap Statistics" item from the "Session" menu. Each time you do this (you can do it as many times during a session as you need) a record will be added to the end of the default log file containing the statistics values at the time you do the "Snap" shot.
To "reset" the statistics values of an in-progress session (for example, in order to gather stats for a specific part of a session rather than the entire session) use the "Reset Statistics" item in the "Session" menu.
To freeze (or unfreeze) the display of an in-progress session, select the "Freeze" (or "unFreeze") from the Session menu.
Note: the items in the "Session" menu are only available when a session "Status" window is active (foremost).
To turn off Serial of Champions monitoring until the next restart (or until you turn monitoring back on) you can use the "Turn SoC Off" item in the "Prefs" menu. Use the "Turn SoC On" item to turn montoring back on. If you need to turn off Serial of Champions completely, you can either drag the "Serial Of Champions INIT" file out of your System or Extensions folder, or, use the "Configuration" dialog to remove all ports from the "Ports" list.
Miscellaneous Notes:
Session Log File Management:
It is possible for a log file to grow too large for the Serial of Champions application to load (I will fix this in a future release). You can allow Serial of Champions to load larger log files by increasing its partition size using the Finder's "Get Info" dialog and entering a larger value in the "Current Size" field in the memory section at the bottom of the dialog. You can avoid the situation by occasionally removing the default session log (or by changing its name or moving it to another location). The Serial of Champions application let's you open log files other than the default by using the "Open" command in its "File" menu.
The statistics:
If you are watching the statistics for a session and they seem to behave strangely (like "local time" suddenly decreasing and "remote time" increasing correspondingly) you are seeing the clever algorithm in action as it decides who it has been waiting on as the communications process proceeds. It looks wierd but don't worry too much about it (I could say "trust me" but I've had too much experience to fall in that trap).
Frightfully dull detail...
Below is an item by item explanation of Status and Log window statistic fields:
Port Name: the name of the port being used during the session.
Application Name: the name of the communications app doing the communicating.
Session Start: time the session was started. This may have been reset by a user
using the Serial of Champions application (Session menu, Reset
Statistics item)
Session End: either the current time (for a Status window details view) or
the time the log record was written (Log window details view).
Session Elapsed: the time duration from Session Start to the time the session
statistics record was sampled or written to the log file.
Send %: percentage of the elapsed time used to transmit data. This is
calculated using the number of bytes sent so far divided by the
bits-per-second rate that the port has been configured to be (or
the "Forced Bps Rate" value set in the SoC configuration).
Receive %: ditto for received bytes;
Local %: percentage of elapsed time not spent transmitting data,
receiving data, or waiting on a response from the remote
computer.
Remote %: percentage of elapsed time waiting on a response from the
remote computer.
Efficiency %: percentage of elapsed time doing actual transmitting or
receiving data (Send % plus Receive %).
Effective Bps rate: this is the calculated effective bits-per-second rate calculated
thus: (bits sent + bits received)/elapsed time. Big surprise
there, eh? Actually, there is one surprise for the terminally
nit-picky out there. There are actually 10bits sent for each
asynchronous (the only kind folks like us usually do) byte sent:
8 data bits, 1 start bit and 1 stop bit. Sometimes it is 7 data bits
1 start bit, 1 stop bit and 1 parity bit. Other arrangements
totalling more or less bits are possible but very rare so I
ignored their existance. If you have one of these rare situation
please let me know and be aware that your numbers might be
off just a bit (ha, ha).
Bytes sent: count of bytes sent so far in the session
Bytes received: ditto for received bytes.
Time sending: amount of time (calculated) spent transmitting bytes at the
configured port bits-per-second rate (or the "Forced Bps Rate"
if set).
Local time: time spent waiting on local response (see Local % above).
Remote time: time spent waiting on the remote computer to respond.
Total bytes: sent byte count plus received byte count.
Total time: this had better equal the elapsed time.
Sends: number of "Write" requests the application has issued to the
Serial Driver for this session. Nice applications issue as few
of these as possible to do their jobs.
Receives: number of "Read" requests the application has issued to the
Serial Driver for this session. Nice applications issue as few
of these as possible to do their jobs.
Avg. Send Msg Size: average number of bytes "written" in each "Write" request.
Avg. Rcv. Msg Size: average number of bytes "read" by each "Read" request.
Usage Licensing Information
The Serial of Champions package was written by Mike Throckmorton for Ziff-Davis Publishing Company and is copyrighted software. There is no charge for the use of this software and you may make copies of the ENTIRE package (including this documentation) and pass it on to others PROVIDING that you do not CHARGE for it. However, making copies for any commercial purpose is prohibited.
If you have any problems or questions about Serial of Champions, you can get help through the ZiffNet/Mac online service. My CompuServe ID is 72220,1611.
If you are desparate or cannot use ZiffNet/Mac, you may contact me at:
Mike Throckmorton
2120 Ardenne Drive
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48105
USA
Ph: 313-662-7902
CompuServe ID: 72220, 1611
Internet: 72220.1611@compuserve.com
WARNING: Although great care has been taken in the design and construction of this package, it may contain errors or may interact with other software or hardware on your computer which may cause operational failures. The effects of such operational failures may cause damage (direct, indirect, etc). A CONDITION FOR USE OF THIS PRODUCT IS THAT: IF YOU USE THIS SOFTWARE you agree that you will not hold me (Mike Throckmorton), Ziff-Davis, or the person you got the package from responsible for such damage. YOU USE THE SOFTWARE at YOUR OWN RISK.
