System Information

The QNX System Information perspective displays realtime statistics about a target machine and the processes running on it. This perspective contains many views that provide diverse and useful information about memory, CPU, and resource usage, and about process and thread interaction on the target.

You can switch to this perspective at any time to examine the current state of your target and its applications. The statistics come from the general-purpose process-level allocator, so there's minimal overhead and you don't have to build an application with instrumentation code to see its runtime metrics. This design makes System Information the best starting point for detecting memory and performance issues and for understanding interprocess and interthread communication.

The perspective also lets you transfer files between the host and target machines and interact with targets and processes in other ways.

Unlike other integrated tools, System Information doesn't require any user action to enable and use. Also, it doesn't have an export or import feature for storing and sharing results outside of the IDE. The idea is that you monitor activity on the target and based on what you see, pick a more specialized tool to further investigate some aspect of the system or an application's behavior.

How data are displayed

Some System Information views—System Summary, System Resources, and APS View—provide system-wide statistics for the target selected in the Target Navigator view. Other views show process-level statistics, also based on the Target Navigator selection. These views are:

Connection Information
Malloc Information
Memory Information
Process Information
Signal Information

When you click a target or process in the Target Navigator, the other views are refreshed. Multi-select is supported, by holding the Ctrl and/or Shift keys when selecting processes, similar to the functionality of Windows Explorer. However, only one other view, Process Information, can show data for multiple processes; the other views show data only for the selected target or process that's listed first (highest).

Reducing the overhead of data refreshing

When new process data become available, the content of the System Information views is automatically updated. This constant updating activity can somewhat increase the load on the host CPU, slowing the IDE. You can improve performance by:

closing the QNX System Information perspective when you're not using it
closing unneeded views within the perspective (you can reopen all of the default views by selecting Window > Reset Perspective)
minimizing or hiding unneeded views
disabling auto-refresh or reducing its frequency, through the Target Navigator toolbar (by default, the views are refreshed every five seconds, but you can reduce this rate)