I would welcome any suggestions, but I have a work-around. I run all my monitors at once, manually using the Chrome extension. I click on the icon in the extension tray and use the drop down option to ‘check all for changes’.
Several months ago I discovered that it was not actually checking them all. At some point as it ran back through the list it would stop. We were never ever to identify a pattern about where it would stop. But if I ran ‘check all’ a second time, it would always complete. Then there was a phase where it would complete all the monitors, but when I clicked to ‘view history’ on a monitor it would take longer and longer to open until the extension crashed with a ‘not enough memory’ error. That phase passed happily, though now it’s back to not checking all monitors (but the extension does not crash). This is much more manageable. I’ve learned that turning the Distill extension off and back on in the Chrome extension manager whenever I saw the extension getting slow prevented the crashes, and if I do it before initiating the ‘check all’ it completes without issue and then performs fine. I forgot to do that this morning and it prompted me to finally post something in case it would be of use to someone.
@b1ackcat Thank you for sharing your experience and workaround. This is actually very useful feedback. Since Local Monitoring runs directly on your own system/browser resources, performance depends heavily on:
the number of monitors being checked
the complexity/heaviness of the websites
available system memory and CPU resources
the number of concurrent workers configured in Distill settings
When using “Check all for changes,” Distill has to load and process many websites simultaneously. If there are a large number of monitors or resource-heavy pages, Chrome memory usage can gradually increase, which may lead to:
incomplete “Check all” runs
slower extension performance
delayed history loading
extension/browser crashes with memory-related errors
Your workaround of disabling/re-enabling the extension before running checks also makes sense, since it helps clear accumulated browser/extension memory usage and refreshes the monitoring environment.
In general:
Local Monitoring works very well for smaller to medium monitor sets
larger monitor collections require sufficient system resources
lowering the concurrent workers setting can sometimes improve stability
We really appreciate you taking the time to share your observations and troubleshooting experience with the community.