Re: Low performance - High spec

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance


"whitik" <guest@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:ea8634c1cfb3f0176a2287d60a328f48@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Hi there, I'm looking for ideas why my computer is not fully utilizing
the resources. I have a Core i7 920 with 12GB Corsair RAM.

For example of the low resource utilization, I am currently unzipping
10 Virtual machine RARs (so several GB apiece) yet the CPU utilization
is only 15% and only 2GB RAM. It's not struggling or anything, I can do
plenty of other tasks without any problems but it doesn't seem to be
consuming the resources it should or performing as it should. The unzip
actions are going to take hours.

I'm fully defragged (reg and disk) and cleaned up. Plenty of disk
space. about 200GB left on the OS Partition and 600GB free on the
"stuff" partition

Any ideas while I'm tooling around with the vista performance monitor
tools?

Thanks,


--
whitik


The slowest component determines the fastest speed a system can accomplish a task.

The slowest operation would be writing out the decompressed data on the hard drive. You have multiple file (reading and writing) operations going on, so that would further limit write operation and there is also latency since the read/write head would have to move around a lot at periods in which neither reading nor writing is done.

Check Highest Active Time for Disk operation in Performance monitor. If it's pegged at 100% and your CPU is only using 12% that's your speed limit.


Ways to improve that maybe use another drive to write to. Read and write operations all on one drive, you have higher operational overhead. R/W head moving around more and operational bandwidth split to reading and writing,

Where as if you have a second drive just for writing out the decompressed data the R/W head doesn't have to move around as much. Reading and writing can occur be done at the same time.

RAID (striping) - alternately writes to two drives at once.

RAID (striping) + another drive. Read from the single drive and write out to the RAID drive. Writing takes significantly longer than reading.

Maybe try SSDs (solid-state memory storage device)? I hate calling them drives, since they don't have a motor.

RAM-Disk.

My setup:
1TB - RAID 5 (striping + error correcting) for OS and Programs
1TB - Single drive - pagefile (virtual memory) also for data storage and backup
4GB - RAMdisk temporary files and search index


.

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