Tech question about RAM (mostly OT)

[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.

[bort411]

[ QUOTE ]
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.

[/ QUOTE ]

1. I put the pagefile on the disk that otherwise has the least activity. My two other drives are used significantly more. A lot of the time, the only thing active on my IDE drive is the pagefile.

2. I've never heard the term "software raid" before. I am only familiar with RAID 0,1, and 0+1. Enlighten me, please.

I would also like to reiterate that my CPU is at 100% usage in the instances I'm speaking of. How is that not my bottleneck?

[fluxrad]

[ QUOTE ]
I've never heard the term "software raid" before. I am only familiar with RAID 0,1, and 0+1. Enlighten me, please.

[/ QUOTE ]

Software RAID is basically RAID 0. However, this won't do anything for I/O.

[bort411]

Good thought about the motherboard; that hadn't crossed my mind. Unfortunately, that's not it. Though I'm not terribly familiar with dual channels, my mobo only has 3 RAM slots, all monotone, and I don't recall anything about dual channel in any literature I've read.

[AncientPC]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I've never heard the term "software raid" before. I am only familiar with RAID 0,1, and 0+1. Enlighten me, please.

[/ QUOTE ]

Software RAID is basically RAID 0. However, this won't do anything for I/O.

[/ QUOTE ]

I was under the impression that software RAID has the CPU offloads the all the computations needed for raid on the CPU instead of it's own dedicated chip. Sort of like comparing software vs hardware modems.

Plus in terms of speed, RAID gives a performance boost of at most 10-15%, and that's for server related applications. For the general user they will not see much of a difference.

Like fluxrad said, do not remove your pagefile.

Like others said, DVD ripping / encoding will basically slow your system down to a crawl if you try to do anything else.

I don't have / use WinTV, but I'm sure that it is probably a big factor in slowing down your system. If you have the Tivo effect, then basically your computer is reading / writing a huge 2-4GB MPEG buffer file on your computer for the ability to pause live TV.

If you record shows and have WinTV compress them, that sucks up even more CPU.

If you use your DVD applications often or record / compress shows off WinTV. You're better off with a second computer dedicated to these tasks. Upgrade to a socket 939 chip and make your current rig the dedicated machine. You don't need a second monitor for the computer, just hook it up to your TV and remote desktop / VNC in to use it.

I still would recommend at least 1GB of RAM. When I had 512MB (and even 768MB) it was often not enough and I'd be using almost all my RAM all the time. Now that I have 2GB of RAM, I rarely see usage spike over 1.2GB. Most of the time it hovers around 830MB.

I wouldn't worry too much about dual channel RAM if you have an Athlon 64. I was messing around with my memory timings and running benchmarks but it didn't seen to have as much of an effect as overclocking the memory used to have. I remember someone stating on Anandtech that Athlon 64's memory optimization has inadvertently made most of dual channel's effectiveness redundant. *shrugs*

[hate]

Software raid is any onboard raid that isn't driven by its own CPU. ie, onboard "raid" cards are software raid rebadged so the idiots can figure out how to set it up. Raid 1 is mirroring, raid 0 is striping, raid 2,3, and 4 aren't used, raid 3 is some kind of odd parity where a single disk is the parity disk rather than raid 5 where parity is spread across the disks. Raid 0 isn't technically a raid type anyway.

This has everything to do with I/O. And as for AncientPC, he quotes that this has at most to do with server applications, yet WinTV/Tivo is going to be the perfect application of a good software raid with that gigantic amount of disk usage. If you can manage to set one up for yourself, it's worth it. As for the 10-15% performance increase, that's pretty much bunk. Moving from 2 disks on separate channels using mirroring (raid 1), my sustained read rates jumped from 35MB/s from a single disk to about 58MB/s from the 2 mirrored disks. Striping will sustain read and write rate improvements that will be akin to that, if not better. The more disks you add, the less your performance increase will be, and putting ATA disks on the same channel decreases your advance in speed considerably.

[astroglide]

software raid isn't limited to raid 0, and raid 0 will only do something for sequential io. IT WON'T MAKE GENERAL USE ANY FASTER. everybody should read http://faq.storagereview.com/tiki-in...leDriveVsRaid0 (there are other raid faqs available as well).

it is perfectly fine for him to disable his paging file if he isn't coming close to using all of his physical memory.

asking tech questions in the zoo is worthless because it always comes down to some sort of dick waving contest instead of actually trying to help the original poster.