Price Checker 2 Performance Tips
Here we’ll teach you how to get the most out of Price checker 2.
Price Checker 2 can handle multiple marketplaces in parallel and analyse prices for as many as 18,000 items per hour on each marketplaces, faster than any other product currently on the market. It can even show results live as they come in and you can filter and sort them to your heart’s content.
However, Price Checker relies on the power of your desktop or laptop PC in order to do so. Although we have made great efforts to reduce memory usage as much as possible, the physical amount of memory (RAM) in your computer means that we are still constrained in how much we can show. In general we recommend a machine with at least 4 cores and 2GB of memory for good general performance.
Direct To Disk
If Price Checker determines that it is unlikely to be able to fit all your results into the live results table, it will switch to something we call Direct To Disk mode (or D2D for short) and write results directly to file instead of showing them on the live results table. It will continue to show progress, so just open your results file in Excel as normal when complete.
But if you really like the Live results feature and want to use it, here’s some changes you can make to be able to do so:
Tip 1: Run marketplaces separately
If you don’t need or don’t intend to use results at the same time, try disabling one of the marketplaces. Do your analysis, then run the other. Depending on the results found on each marketplace this could as much as halve memory consumption as this way only results for one marketplace need to be kept in RAM.
Also, this is the best way to reduce CPU usage if you find your computer becoming very noisy, using 100% CPU, or running sluggishly.
Tip 2: Split your file
This may not be as convenient, but try splitting your file and running each half separately. This will easily cut memory consumption in half.
Tip 3: Close other programs
If you have problems with Price checker not starting or running slowly, try closing other programs and running Price Checker on a dedicated machine.
Tip 4: Add more memory
Perhaps that’s quite obvious, but the more memory you can make available to Price Checker, the better it will run. If you are notified of the switch to D2D mode, there will also be an indication of approximately how much extra memory is required.
Price Checker will try not to use more than a third of what you have available, as doing so may mean that it can’t start at all. So if you go out and buy memory, you should add at least 3x as much as it suggests is required, or combine with the next tip.
Tip 5: Increasing memory allocation manually
This is slightly technical, but not very difficult. Locate the Price Checker 2 shortcut on your desktop and copy it. Change the name to “Price Checker 2 – Increased Memory”. This way you can easily revert if anything doesn’t work as expected.
In the shortcut properties add the following as a parameter to the executable:
-J-Xmx2048M
Your shortcut may then look like this:
Explanation:
As mentioned in tip 4 above, Price Checker 2 will by default only consume 1/3 of all your system’s available RAM (but at least 1024MB). -J-Xmx is a passthrough parameter that can override this maximum.
As you can see it is followed immediately by 2048M. This stands for 2048 Megabytes. Although it is best to stick to powers of 2, you can specify almost any number. Some examples:
-J-Xmx1536M = set maximum to 1536MB (i.e. 1.5GB)
-J-Xmx2048M = set maximum to 2048MB (i.e. 2GB)
-J-Xmx2500M = set maximum to 2500MB (i.e. 2.44GB)
-J-Xmx3000M = set maximum to 3000MB (i.e. 2.93GB)
-J-Xmx3072M = set maximum to 3072MB (i.e. 3GB)