Latedroid: SeePU FAQ

SeePU FAQ

Technically-oriented answers about SeePU here.

The entries in notification pane take up a lot of space! Can't they be merged/removed altogether?

Unfortunately, the answer is no. The Android OS requires every icon in the status bar to have one corresponding entry in the pane. So if you enable bot CPU and network monitoring, you'll have two 'Click to configure' entries, and you'll have to live with the redundancy and the wasted space :/
Alternatively, consider buying SeePU++, it can make use of the entries to show a detailed historical plot of CPU and network usage.

Update once a second?! Won't this slaughter my poor battery?

Not in the slightest.
How? Simple: when the screen is off, SeePU does absolutely nothing. When the screen is on, the only difference it might make is on CPU usage itself - see below for how ridiculously low this is.

I've been staring at my phone for half a minute without touching it, but my cpu bar always has some little sliver of green instead of being completely black.

Nothing to worry about - that just shows that CPU utilization is as low as it gets. There's no "0%" all-black icon - it's highly unlikely anyway for Android CPUs to be less than 1 or 2% busy when "awake" - well, unless you set the minimim clock speed over 1000MHz :)

My free memory bar never gets full! What should I do?

Android can function well with very little free RAM (it will reclaim memory on an as-needed basis), so this doesn't necessarily indicates there's a problem, especially if your device doesn't have much RAM to begin with (e.g. T-Mobile G1/HTC Dream); you will eventually use most of your RAM just by opening apps.
Consider the free RAM bar a hint of the performance you'll get when interacting with the device.

If, on the other hand, you see the memory bar constantly jumping from middle orange to low red and back, this might be a sign of a chronic low memory problem - too many background apps (or widgets) competing for memory. Use a task manager to see what's going on.

Right after [Task killer app name] does its job, the free memory bar goes up, but then comes down again quickly.

Task killers, generally speaking, aren't such a good idea - save for very specific cases. You should rely on Android's own memory management (customizable with MinFreeManager or AutoKiller, if you're so inclined) and the apps own settings - if you have an app that refuses to get out of the way while doing nothing useful for you, thus just wasting RAM, you should probably uninstall it.

What about resource usage by SeePU itself?

SeePU is optimized to use as little resources as possible. Many tricks are used to this end. But there's no such thing as a free lunch: the 0.5 seconds update interval will use some CPU (still very little) - especially on slower devices. So, generally speaking, don't use that - use 1 or 2 seconds, you'll hardly notice the difference in feedback time.
With a setting of 2 seconds or 5 seconds, SeePU is for all practical matters completely nonexistent, CPU-usage-wise.
BUT: anything you enable besides the basic CPU graph will inevitably increase CPU usage. In ascending order: RAM usage, network usage, network history plot, CPU/RAM history plot. If you actively use your device for extensive periods of time and are particularly concerned about your battery, only enable the features you need, when you need them (re-configuration is one tap away at all times, after all) - as always, it's a matter of compromising.

Why is there a 0.5 seconds update frequency, if you advise against using it?

Because it's really useful to me - I'm a developer and need that kind of granularity when testing apps.

I want it to show the current CPU frequency!

Lo and behold - it's already there (well, sorta), as Android scales the frequency depending on the current CPU load.