I am trying to use Redmon 1.7 on my windows XP SP2 desktop machine. I process the data provided by Redmon to MyProgram.exe and then write it out to stdout which Redmon sends to printer port.
But MyProgram.exe(written in java) is taking about 5 seconds to execute(as it is being run on Pentium 4 processor). So, I am trying to optimize my application and one thing which I am planning to try is, running MyProgram.exe as a service, as oppose to a program. This would save me the time of launching the program and also reading data in memory from persistence storage(Hard Disk) every time I issue a print command.
So I had few questions and was hoping if somebody can help me with them:-
1) Can I run my application as a windows service(MyService.exe) instead of a normal program i.e. would Redmon pass the printer data to stdin of MyService.exe and read data from its stdout ? If not, then is there a way I can do this, so that I can avoid having to launch my program again and again.
2) Does Redmon itself run as a service or does it get launched every time when a print command is sent.
Thanks! Manas