Re: Program really slow..

shawn wrote:
At work I'm using a 1.8 (maybe 1.9) Ghz PC with 1GB memory on Windows XP with all the latest updates including SP3. I have an 18 gig drive with 1.5GB free. I know they usually recommend keeping 10% free, but I've been like this for awhile.

I don't have many things running when my computer starts up, although I do have a few.

My CPU idles at about 4% usage. When I jiggle the mouse a little the CPU usage will go up a little, if I jiggle the mouse faster I can get it to go up to 100% sometimes. Most of the time around 77%. Is this normal?

But anyway on to the real problem. Everything is fairly slow and I know this. The company won't upgrade our computers. But one piece of software used to work fine. It's a programming language I use. It used to work fine and all of the sudden out of nowhere it got slow. Sometimes opening it will take a good 10 to 20 seconds. Then when you inside and you scroll up and down through your code it'll be REALLY slow.. you know how you scroll in your internet program (IE or Firefox) and it scrolls nice and smooth? In this program what is happening now is it'll scroll one or two lines at a time very slowly. With a 1.5 to 2 second pause in between each scroll. I can just click on the scroll bar to the right instead, but then I have to wait 1.5 to 2 seconds for the screen to update, so I really can't tell if I've scrolled to the right part.

Any thoughts on why all of the sudden only that program started to behave weird?

It doesn't get installed.. it's just an EXE file you run. I've deleted it and recopied it. No luck.

Sometimes it behaves fine, but out of nowhere it'll get all slow/laggy. Sometimes it'll be slow and laggy, and I'll open up another program and switch back, and it'll work fine.

I've already ran HiJack this to look for anything suspicious, have Symantec installed on our office server, which scans all the individual computers, etc. Already ran a defrag too. My system has always had this low disk space and the program used to work fine.


To start, benchmark with HDTune.

http://www.hdtune.com/hdtune_255.exe

The purpose of doing that, is to see whether the disk is in PIO mode or not.
A 7200RPM IDE (ribbon cable) disk, might manage 60MB/sec near the beginning
of the disk, and 40MB/sec near the end of the disk. On a brand new disk,
where there are few downward spikes in the plot, you can even see the
"zones" on the disk platter.

This is the curve for a relatively fast disk. Bandwidth ranges from 85MB/sec
down to about 55MB/sec on this one. My disks are a bit more modest in
performance.

http://www.legitreviews.com/images/reviews/699/hdtune_1500.jpg

You can check basic parameters of the CPU and memory, with this.

http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php

For a simple performance benchmark, you can try SuperPI. I use 1 million
digits for older processors, as those processors don't have a very large
L2 cache.

http://www.xtremesystems.com/pi/super_pi_mod-1.5.zip

(http://www.xtremesystems.com/pi/)

To get numbers to compare against, I use hwbot.org. This is for
a P4 1.8GHz Northwood. There are only a couple entries for stock
operating speed. I picked one here as an example.

http://www.hwbot.org/ResultBrowseByProcessor.do?cpuModelId=1316

207. CPU-Z - 1800.4 mhz - RomanLV (Over?lockers.?om.UA Team )
- (Pentium 4 1.8Ghz Northwood @ 1800mhz)
Time = 1 minute 39.4 seconds or 99.4 seconds total for 1 million digits

In addition to some basic benchmarks and checks, you can also use
Sysinternals Process Explorer, and see what percentage of time is
spent on DPC (deferred procedure calls, a part of servicing interrupts
at non-interrupt level) or interrupts. In some cases, there are chips
with known design problems, that create "interrupt storms", and that
can reduce visible performance. Interrupt related issues tend to be
hidden from the user. Sometimes certain interrupt issues even cause
problems with Windows time keeping accuracy (more than the normal
drift).

(Process Explorer)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

HTH,
Paul
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