1password helper

vahur

What does the helper do ? What will not work when it is not running ? I do not really like yet another process running in the background, especially when it takes 30-40M of RAM and seems to wake up from time to time, according to Activity Monitor.

Ben

Hi vahur!



The helper's primary function is to make the browser extensions work. Because the extensions are sandboxed, they can't access anything outside of their own database (including your Agile Keychain, which contains all your logins). The helper's responsibility is to sync the information between your Agile Keychain and each extensions' database.



It does some other neat things too like gives you access to Go & Fill from the menu bar, but the above is its main purpose.



In short: it is a really good thing to have, but not absolutely essential (which is why there is a preference to turn it off).



I hope that clarifies.

Ben

Fooligan

Hi Ben,



Can you add some of this info to FAQ for 3.9? I was curious as to the primary function of the helper as well and the FAQ wasn't all clear about that. Since you can disable the menu bar item separately from the actual helper, I wasn't sure why I would still need helper running. This thread helped clarify that.

Ben

Will do just that, thanks for the suggestion Fooligan.

macalba

The Helper seems to be a "Good Thing" but according to Activity Monitor it's consuming 304.6 MB of "Real Mem" at the moment. Am I seeing a memory leak here (I'm using Chrome with 1P 3.9.0 and extension 3.8.5.31072)? Otherwise the usage seems a bit excessive (especially when compared to Fooligan's 30 to 40MB usage).



Gordon

Catcher

Using FF7 latest and 'helper' is showing as 22.1mb - if that's any help.

zexpe

Guys, the 1Password Helper is a great idea, but please, please look into optimising its memory usage. My computer currently has half of its memory banks in use, with 1Password Helper occupying third place in the memory hog stakes at 81MB. Really, I know it's 2011 and my computer has 4GB of memory, but why on Earth does a background helper app need 81MB of memory!?! It's not running any interactive windows and even if it has my complete 1Password.agilekeychain in memory at all times that could only account for 10MB (the size of that file).



[img]http://oi51.tinypic.com/10r946p.jpg[/img]

macalba

Thanks Catcher. Sounds like my 300 MB+ is a tad high then <img src='http://forum.agilebits.com/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/skype_smile.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':-)' />

Ben

Hey folks!



Thanks for pointing this out. I definitely understand your concern. On my machine running 3.9, I see a real memory usage from the helper of about 80MB. 1Password itself is using about 35MB. I'm not sure why we would be seeing the huge difference, but I've let our developers know about this and hopefully we can track it down. I'll let you know when I have more info.



Thanks for the heads up!

Ben

shinratdr

Hey, whaddya know, a painful bug in the MAS version that would have been caught in public beta testing. Now who could have seen that coming.