Tech question about RAM (mostly OT)

[Kablooie]

Then what programs are you running that are giving you 100% cpu utilisation?

[bort411]

[ QUOTE ]
Then what programs are you running that are giving you 100% cpu utilisation?

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm usually running at least 5 of the following:

Pokertracker (updating every 2 minutes)
iTunes
Between 5 and 20 windows of poker
DVD applications (either ripping, encoding, writing, or watching)
WinTV
Firefox
Thunderbird
AIM
Word
File transfer clients (usually about 25 transfers)

Also, I have 3 monitors running and I believe some extra CPU performance goes toward managing my displays.

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What does your load look like when nothing is running?

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0% CPU usage, about 250 of 1500MB physical RAM used.

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But more importantly, I don't understand why you believe that using all of your RAM is critical.

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It's not critical, but if I can use more of it to improve performance, I'd like to. If the consensus is that my setup is optimal or close to optimal, so be it.

[fluxrad]

[ QUOTE ]
I'm usually running at least 5 of the following:

Pokertracker (updating every 2 minutes)
iTunes
Between 5 and 20 windows of poker
DVD applications (either ripping, encoding, writing, or watching)
WinTV
Firefox
Thunderbird
AIM
Word
File transfer clients (usually about 25 transfers)

[/ QUOTE ]

And you wonder why your box is pegged?

[bort411]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I'm usually running at least 5 of the following:

Pokertracker (updating every 2 minutes)
iTunes
Between 5 and 20 windows of poker
DVD applications (either ripping, encoding, writing, or watching)
WinTV
Firefox
Thunderbird
AIM
Word
File transfer clients (usually about 25 transfers)

[/ QUOTE ]

And you wonder why your box is pegged?

[/ QUOTE ]

No. I wondered if I could use more of my memory to improve performance.

[Kablooie]

Almost certainly not.

From that list of applications i would suspect you are disk and cpu bound. The dvd ripping is probably doing the most damage on both counts.

Basically it's like this. Historically there has always been a major bottleneck somewhere on your pc, caused by a drastic mismatch in relative throughput speeds between different components. This used to be the network card in the days of dialup connections, now it's the disk drive which really hasn't increased that much in speed in the last few years, (cpu has typically gone up by a factor of 10 in the same time), and the backplane of the computer - unless you've got a 64 bit PCI bus - and even then.

To speed things up for that kind of application mix, the best thing would be to get fast SCSI disks, since you have the 64 bit computer - they're not that cheap though.

[Blarg]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I'm usually running at least 5 of the following:

Pokertracker (updating every 2 minutes)
iTunes
Between 5 and 20 windows of poker
DVD applications (either ripping, encoding, writing, or watching)
WinTV
Firefox
Thunderbird
AIM
Word
File transfer clients (usually about 25 transfers)

[/ QUOTE ]

And you wonder why your box is pegged?

[/ QUOTE ]

That kinda blew me away too.

The DVD ripping etc is already pretty crazy, but importing into Pokertracker every 2 minutes is also clearly going to be a strain.

If I were playing 20 tables, I'd be doing it on at least two computers, preferably three.

[bort411]

I appreciate the input from anyone.

As far as multitasking, I have everything pretty evenly distributed, with each of my hard drives sharing the burden (7 partitions across 3 drives). The bottleneck is most certainly coming from my CPU, which clearly resents my ambitions to multitask.

My desire is to utilize more memory to compensate for this, but it doesn't seem like this can be done. Also, I should point out that I really don't have much (usually not any) overall slowdown; it's just that continually seeing my CPU usage at 100% with memory usage below 50% bothers me.

[astroglide]

hit ctrl-shift-esc, click 'processes', then click 'cpu' twice to sort by cpu utilization and you can see exactly what is using what % of your cpu

[hate]

You're talking about this like you've done a lot regarding your disk usage, when you've done virtually nothing. Putting the pagefile on your slowest disk is error #1. Not even entertaining a software raid is error #2. If you've got cash enough to splurge on 1.5GB of ram, then you've got more than enough to splurge on a couple or preferrably 3 or more 10k RPM sata disks. I seriously doubt your CPU is the bottleneck here, I think I/O definitely is.

[fluxrad]

no. if it says his CPU is at 100% then it's his CPU.

I run ATA133 disks since I'm too cheap to get the new Serial-ATA [censored]. Now then, at my speed buffered disk reads happen at something like 30MB/sec (this is assuming UDMA is enabled, which is a given in Windows). W/ serial ATA, the speed would be considerable greater. There's no way he's reading or writing to disk at greater than 50MB/sec.

Now what about RAM. Well first off he's got 1.5 gig of the stuff so capacity isn't a problem. He's most likely running PC3200 so there's no particular bandwidth problem. One possibility (and I haven't checked this out) is that since he's running 1.5GB instead of 1.0GB he's not taking advantage of the dual channel capabilities of his motherboard. --> check your motherboard. Are there different colored slots? If so, make sure their filled up in pairs. That is to say, make sure only the blue slots are filled...next the black. I'm guessing you've got 2 blue filled and one black - this might be causing a memory bottleneck. However, this alone isn't enough to cause the problems you're seeing.

Realistically, the problem is the CPU. DVD ripping is seriously CPU intensive. So are database applications (one of which is PokerTracker). There are also a number of "cruncing" apps that you had listed. Unless you're running quad Xeons, you're going to be bottlenecked.

But...you've got a nice box so you just need to stop hammering it so hard. Or get about $50k together and we'll solve your problems with a Sun E420.