Pokertracker load time

[edrugtrader]

[ QUOTE ]
he said defragging ISN'T RECOMMENDED, as in IT IS A BAD IDEA. that is completely wrong. ntfs doesn't thrash as badly as fat32 but it's still a very necessary part of routine maintenance. your observation about emptiness is irrelevant as well, if seeks have to be thrown around the drive because a file is non-contiguous it is going to slow things down regardless of how much free space you have.

[/ QUOTE ]
buddy, come on. if you guys want to thrash my statistical theories, that i only bring up because i don't fully understand them, so be it. but i have a masters in computer science, i've written a filesystem, and understand how things work. i also have a BS in math focusing on logic and number theory.

first off, your logic is wrong... "isn't recommended" does not imply "bad idea". not even close. if someone running modern FS and OS ask me if they need to defrag, i'll tell them "most likely no". it isn't a bad idea... just a waste of time.

second, free space is no where near irrelavant. if anything it is most important. the filesystems are smart enough to take advantage of contiguous free space. with the latest OS and filesystems, if your disk was always 50% empty, you would never have to defragment, ever. i'm not neccessarily referring to windows 2000 and NTFS, but they do a good job.

here's something i love to point out to the "my computer is slow, time to defragment" gamer boys who are running modern OS and FS with 250GB hard drives. microsoft was smart and added a tip to the defrag tool that says whether or not it is necessary. show me a drive that has alays been 50% empty where the defrag tool states that you should actually use it. you won't be able to.

you guys like to argue about everything.

[edrugtrader]

[ QUOTE ]
for best performance it's always good and safe to schedule a nightly defrag

[/ QUOTE ]
if you want to blow out your hard drive a year or two early, only to possibly reduce the seek time a few microseconds on a handful of your MP3s... then it is a GREAT idea.

[Matt24]

You need a PCI video card, one that goes into the PCI slot in your computer. You should have plenty open. If you have 2 AGP slots, then you can get anohter AGP card.

[Blarg]

[ QUOTE ]
Your statements about his computer upgrades not being feasible are equally false

[/ QUOTE ]

If you think 192 megs of RAM makes things "zippy," I'm going to have to strongly disagree. Windows alone can use up 128 megs of RAM, leaving you a lousy 64 megs to run all your programs on? You gotta be kidding.

I have a GIG of RAM and sometimes write to my hard drive when web surfing. A gig of RAM is HUGE compared to 192 megs of RAM. 192 megs is so small that it's almost impossible to even buy a desktop these days with RAM that low. Even the 256 megs that are standard on even the crappiest modern systems is paltry for users who do much of anything.

If he wants to play any remotely modern game, web surf, or do almost anything, he's not well served by your idea of "zippy" at all. 192 megs of RAM is nutty.

God forbid he tries to import a bunch of Pokertracker hands. He will be grinding and grinding that hard disk forever.

For $500 he can get a 2.8 cpu with a 60 or 80 ATA 100 hard disk and 512 of RAM, and likely a video card as good as or better than the one he's using now even if it's built into the motherboard. And it will play everything at least at a moderate level, and do many things quite well. Anyone can try to get along miserably, constantly grinding to their hard disk with their 192 megs of RAM, but that's where the judgment comes in. Just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you should or that it really pays off well. At a certain point, it's just throwing good money after bad. Frankly, installing a raptor hard disk in an ancient boat is ridiculous. Just get a vanilla Western Digital or Maxtor for dirt cheap...but get it in a new system for goodness sake.

Trying the prolong the life of a 733 cpu system by overbuilding it with newer parts may be a way to keep guys like you in business, but it's the kind of thing you do when you have absolutely no other choice at all -- and you still expect, and get, a crummy result.

People would be better off just saving their money -- not spending it on crap -- until they can get a new system. Their money will get what is a comparative winner instead of patching up the holes in a sinking ship. At $500, a 2.8 CPU 512 RAM 60 gig HD system is a far wiser investment than throwing away money on a piece of crap and calling it "zippy."

Everything's zippy, if you say it is.

[helpmeout]

A 733 is a decent system that will run most applications almost as good as a new computer, however it will struggle when the going gets tough.

If you have poker tracker with heaps of data then I'd recommend a new computer, sure adding more memory and a better hd might make it a bit better but computers are so cheap now that you can probably afford to buy a new one.

Just add the 733 to a home network and use it for anything else you do.

[astroglide]

[ QUOTE ]
buddy, come on. if you guys want to thrash my statistical theories, that i only bring up because i don't fully understand them, so be it. but i have a masters in computer science, i've written a filesystem, and understand how things work. i also have a BS in math focusing on logic and number theory.

[/ QUOTE ]

interesting software background. that says absolutely nothing about your understanding of hardware.

[ QUOTE ]
first off, your logic is wrong... "isn't recommended" does not imply "bad idea"

[/ QUOTE ]

yet you go on (incorrectly) to say that nightly defrags are a bad idea. if you're giving honest advice to somebody and you say "i would not recommend doing that" you usually mean that it is either worthless, risky, or bad.

[ QUOTE ]
second, free space is no where near irrelavant. if anything it is most important. the filesystems are smart enough to take advantage of contiguous free space. with the latest OS and filesystems, if your disk was always 50% empty, you would never have to defragment, ever. i'm not neccessarily referring to windows 2000 and NTFS, but they do a good job.

here's something i love to point out to the "my computer is slow, time to defragment" gamer boys who are running modern OS and FS with 250GB hard drives. microsoft was smart and added a tip to the defrag tool that says whether or not it is necessary. show me a drive that has alays been 50% empty where the defrag tool states that you should actually use it. you won't be able to.

[/ QUOTE ]

Volume (C:
Volume size = 223 GB
Cluster size = 4 KB
Used space = 102 GB
Free space = 121 GB
Percent free space = 54 %

Volume fragmentation
Total fragmentation = 41 %
File fragmentation = 83 %
Free space fragmentation = 0 %

File fragmentation
Total files = 56,635
Average file size = 2,245 KB
Total fragmented files = 1,211
Total excess fragments = 138,498
Average fragments per file = 3.44

Pagefile fragmentation
Pagefile size = 1,536 MB
Total fragments = 1

Directory fragmentation
Total directories = 3,175
Fragmented directories = 384
Excess directory fragments = 2,338

Master File Table (MFT) fragmentation
Total MFT size = 157 MB
MFT record count = 60,441
Percent MFT in use = 37 %
Total MFT fragments = 2

there are singular files which have many thousands of fragments. 13,438 for a 2gb ghost image (written all at once). 12,290 for another. 9,585 for an 850mb pst file which was again written all at once using exmerge.

the filesystem has never been over 50% full. here's a picture (red = fragmented, blue = contiguous, green = unmovable, white=freespace):

[astroglide]

if you want to blow out your hard drive a year or two early, only to possibly reduce the seek time a few microseconds on a handful of your MP3s... then it is a GREAT idea

seeking wears out drives much more than reading and writing. if files are heavily fragmented, it causes a lot of seeking (and slowdown) every time they are accessed. if you defrag that seeking is done once and then future reads will be contiguous. pvrs use desktop drives and are literally writing (and possibly reading) 100% of the time, yet they aren't plagued by massive failures.

[BradleyT]

Yeah I got 53% free on one of my partitions (40GB) and it tells me I should defrag that partition.

[Richard Berg]

[ QUOTE ]
Then it's obvious you don't know how to build/tweak a system.

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LOL. The fact that you think you need to "tweak" a system says volumes about your computer engineering background.

[ QUOTE ]
There's a huge freaking difference in programs like Visual Studio.NET or Photoshop CS

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You'll notice I mentioned IE and Word2K...I wouldn't dream of running VS.NET on a K6-2.

[ QUOTE ]
Program loads are 10-30 seconds faster at home and even things like closing down applications is many seconds faster. Don't even talk about trying to open 5+ applications and switch between them - the performance difference is huge.


[/ QUOTE ]
You're the one with the misconfigured -- err, "tweaked" -- system if it takes you 30 seconds to open one app. I was able to spawn 5 IE windows (w/ quick-loading start pages e.g. Google over OC12s) in under 2 seconds on the Celeron. Launching OE, Word, and Excel simultaneously took 3 seconds. What's that? You've never written your own application benchmark? Please try again with a poster in your own league of experience.

Granted, this is OE5 on Win98, but that's good enough for a lot of people. If I told everyone who walked through the door to buy a 2GHz-class machine and a copy of XP, we'd lose years of reputation WRT straight-talking customer service.

[ QUOTE ]
Anyone who says a POS older system runs "just as fast" as a newer system obviously has a POS newer system plain and simple.

[/ QUOTE ]
I encourage you to read the things I actually write, as opposed to the things you think I write. I know enough about performance optimization (how many lines of SSE assembly code have you written again? how many DDKs do you have on your dev machine?) to ensure that my recommendations are tailored to the applications at hand. If he were asking about Maya that would be one thing, but PokerTracker is not a CPU hog, period.

[Richard Berg]

This post is 100% correct about filesystem fragmentation, just for the record.