OT: XP Performance Bottleneck(s)?

  • Thread starter Thread starter PeteCresswell
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PeteCresswell

This is way off-topic, but I'm pretty sure the expertise is here.

I've got a PC that is reasonably quick most of the time: Core2 @3ghz w/
4 gigs of RAM.

No complaints when just coding/testing/doing email/web browsing.

But with 25 concurrent file copies running (from a partition on the
same disc as the system is on to an external USB2 wrapped drive) the
thing has been brought to it's knees: only barey usable for other
tasks.

But what puzzles me is that TaskMan says that CPU usage is only 3
percent and it's only using 1.03 gigs of RAM.

That suggests to me that there is a bottleneck that I don't know
about.

If so, can anybody elucidate?

When I build my next PC, what should I look for to get better
peformance with a lot of concurrent file copies running?
 
XP is a workstation operating system and is probably not optimized for
multiple files transfers like a server OS would be. Also, the motherboard
and the CPU are probably not too unlike a Xeon and a specialized motherboard
would be. If you want the performance of a server for serving files, you
will have to buy one.

In your case, in the System Properties | Advanced | Performance [Settings] |
Advanced; you could choose to give preference to "Background services" and
"System cache" (and reboot your machine). On the internet, possibly that
you will also find some documentation on how to hack XP in order to increase
the number of files buffers and of internal resources but don't expect any
miracle with any of this.

--
Sylvain Lafontaine, ing.
MVP - Windows Live Platform
Email: sylvain2009 sylvainlafontaine com (fill the blanks, no spam please)
Independent consultant and remote programming for Access and SQL-Server
(French)
 
PeteCresswell said:
When I build my next PC, what should I look for to get better
peformance with a lot of concurrent file copies running?
Click to expand...

25 physical hard drives.

Ok, that's a sarcastic reply. <smile> But the problem is that the
hard drive is the bottleneck. If you copy one file at a time the
head on the hard drive likely doesn't have to move very far to grab
the next block of data. (Ignoring file defragmenting of course.)

But as soon as you go to copy two files at the same time the hard
drive head has to move back and forth between the two files.
Conceivably this could increase your file copy time by a factor of ten
or twenty. Just for two concurrent file copying.

Now an SSD drive would likely help this a great deal. But even then
copying two files concurrently might not be any faster than two files
consecutively. Now you'd be dealing with the IO throughput of the
SSD read mechanism and your system busses.

Tony
--
Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
Tony's Main MS Access pages - http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm
Tony's Microsoft Access Blog - http://msmvps.com/blogs/access/
For a free, convenient utility to keep your users FEs and other files
updated see http://www.autofeupdater.com/
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