I don't get it..... Maybe OT??

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pheasant16

Just built a new box with an Athalon II X3 triple core running 3.1Ghz
and 4GB DDR3 ram. The MSI board has onboard video, so know some of the
RAM and CPU go to it, but would think I'd have enough power to spare.
Still using WXP Home SP3

Was streaming a netflix movie through PlayOn to the WDTV box. The
weekly clean up program started running, disk cleanup didn't affect
video, but when defragmenter kicked in the video slowed, and got choppy.

I looked in Task Manager and total CPU use was 25-35%. (still not sure
how to read it since all 3 cores seem to show same use)

Thought with this CPU I'd be able to run more than just video stream,
and internet browsing with power to spare. Very little of the RAM was
being used.

What do I need to do so I can let resource hog programs work happily
together? :\

Thanks

Mark
 
pheasant16 said:
Just built a new box with an Athalon II X3 triple core running 3.1Ghz
and 4GB DDR3 ram. The MSI board has onboard video, so know some of the
RAM and CPU go to it, but would think I'd have enough power to spare.
Still using WXP Home SP3

Was streaming a netflix movie through PlayOn to the WDTV box. The
weekly clean up program started running, disk cleanup didn't affect
video, but when defragmenter kicked in the video slowed, and got choppy.

I looked in Task Manager and total CPU use was 25-35%. (still not sure
how to read it since all 3 cores seem to show same use)

Thought with this CPU I'd be able to run more than just video stream,
and internet browsing with power to spare. Very little of the RAM was
being used.

What do I need to do so I can let resource hog programs work happily
together? :\

Thanks

Mark
Click to expand...

Disk is a limited resource. If you have only one hard drive,
and three programs want to read and write it at the same time,
there are "large blank intervals", measured in milliseconds,
where the head of the disk is moving from one area to another.
That happens over and over again, as the programs take turns working
on their area of the disk. Thrashing head movement, tends to
reduce the performance level for all of the programs. You
may get better results, by executing the three programs
sequentially, reducing competition for the disk.

One way to solve that, is have two physical disks. Run the defragmenter
on disk #1, while streaming a movie via disk #2. I keep two disks
in my computer, and frequently plan "read from disk #1" / "write
to disk #2", in order to get better usage from the disks. I get
closer to the sustained bandwidth of the disk that way.

You could save disk defragmentation for a scheduled interval,
like 3:00 AM when you're in bed. Then, the disk can be used
solely by the defragmenter. If defragmentation is scheduled to
run frequently, it might reduce the time of completion for
each night's run.

Another way to improve things, is use an SSD, instead of a regular
rotating hard drive. But SSD prices are too high, to use them
for bulk data storage (terabytes). And you're not supposed to
defragment them anyway, so if you owned one, you'd have to
turn off defrag on that drive. The reason for that, is seek
time is close to zero on an SSD, and fragmentation would have
to be seriously bad, before it would make a noticeable difference.
The virtual head of the SSD, can fly around 10000 to 40000 times
a second.

Defragmenting an SSD is also not recommended, because of the amount
or write cycles it puts the flash memory chips inside the SSD through.

As you could be dealing with fairly large amounts of data, owning
extra disks, and arranging the usage patterns carefully, may help
a bit.

HTH,
Paul
 
Paul said:
Disk is a limited resource. If you have only one hard drive,
and three programs want to read and write it at the same time,
there are "large blank intervals", measured in milliseconds,
where the head of the disk is moving from one area to another.
That happens over and over again, as the programs take turns working
on their area of the disk. Thrashing head movement, tends to
reduce the performance level for all of the programs. You
may get better results, by executing the three programs
sequentially, reducing competition for the disk.

One way to solve that, is have two physical disks. Run the defragmenter
on disk #1, while streaming a movie via disk #2. I keep two disks
in my computer, and frequently plan "read from disk #1" / "write
to disk #2", in order to get better usage from the disks. I get
closer to the sustained bandwidth of the disk that way.

You could save disk defragmentation for a scheduled interval,
like 3:00 AM when you're in bed. Then, the disk can be used
solely by the defragmenter. If defragmentation is scheduled to
run frequently, it might reduce the time of completion for
each night's run.
Click to expand...

You're dead on. 1 1.5TB disk. It is partitioned into 3, C,E,F. 2
External HD's also. So if I would add another(internal) physical disk,
and let PlayOn do it's streaming thing on it, defrag would be happier?

I'm just an old out of date tinkerer, so moving maintenance time would
by far be easiest solution for me. I do have a few old 80GB hd's
collecting dust,installing one of them would also be easy.

SSD ain't something that tickles me urge to tinker with, or spend money
on, so that won't be happening.

I think just changing time would fix it, but opening the box is fun too,
so clue me in on adding another hd if you don't mind. If there is
nothing to be gained, will just change the scheduled time for defrag.

Thanks Paul
 
Just built a new box with an Athalon II X3 triple core running 3.1Ghz
and 4GB DDR3 ram. The MSI board has onboard video, so know some of the
RAM and CPU go to it, but would think I'd have enough power to spare.
Still using WXP Home SP3

Was streaming a netflix movie through PlayOn to the WDTV box. The
weekly clean up program started running, disk cleanup didn't affect
video, but when defragmenter kicked in the video slowed, and got choppy.

I looked in Task Manager and total CPU use was 25-35%. (still not sure
how to read it since all 3 cores seem to show same use)

Thought with this CPU I'd be able to run more than just video stream,
and internet browsing with power to spare. Very little of the RAM was
being used.

What do I need to do so I can let resource hog programs work happily
together? :\
Click to expand...

Your problem here wasn't CPU usage, it was disk usage.
 
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