Program much slower in XP

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Guest

At work we have a database program that I help manage. We were using 98 to
do this, and are in the process of switching over to XP.

Since we are moving from 400Mhz PCs running 98, to 2.4Ghz PCs running XP,
there is a nice speed and reliability boost as you would expect. The
exception to this is when I run the housekeeping utils on our database.

Initially the job is getting done with the increased speed you might expect,
but after a few minutes it slows down to a crawl. CPU usage, after being
pegged at 100% in the begining, it drops to less than 10%. The aggragate
effect is that the task takes much longer on the new PCs than it takes on the
old ones.

I have checked with our tech support, and noone I have asked has been able
to tell me why. Since they do not know why, they cannot suggest a solution.

It seems to me that XP is lowering the CPU priority of the task, after a
time, or religating it to the background. I have tried changing the
performance settings to adjust for best performance of Background services,
but this had no effect.
 
jc said:
At work we have a database program that I help manage. We were using 98
to
do this, and are in the process of switching over to XP.

Since we are moving from 400Mhz PCs running 98, to 2.4Ghz PCs running XP,
there is a nice speed and reliability boost as you would expect. The
exception to this is when I run the housekeeping utils on our database.

Initially the job is getting done with the increased speed you might
expect,
but after a few minutes it slows down to a crawl. CPU usage, after being
pegged at 100% in the begining, it drops to less than 10%. The aggragate
effect is that the task takes much longer on the new PCs than it takes on
the
old ones.

I have checked with our tech support, and noone I have asked has been able
to tell me why. Since they do not know why, they cannot suggest a
solution.

It seems to me that XP is lowering the CPU priority of the task, after a
time, or religating it to the background. I have tried changing the
performance settings to adjust for best performance of Background
services,
but this had no effect.
Click to expand...

Not that I proport to have a solution for this, but I seem to recall from
early days that the Windows process scheduler increases the scheduling
priority of a process if it is waiting for user-input and decreases the
priority if it is not (in favor obviously of those that are!).
I could imagine that if this happens repeatedly (ie. decreasing the
processing priority) you would end up with what you ar experiencing, given
that such houskeeping tasks usually do their work without any
user-interfacing needed.
I cannot say for sure that this paradigm has changed dramatically.
It has changed somewhat in that there are those 'Above...' and 'Below...'
choices possible these days.
Also, are you running a HT CPU type? Also worth checking into that direction
if you are.
Maybe you're onto something.

george
 
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "are you running a HT CPU type" the pc is
a Celeron. I won't be able to test changing the priority for a few days.
 
jc said:
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "are you running a HT CPU type"
the pc is a Celeron. I won't be able to test changing the priority
for a few days.
Click to expand...

Celeron?

Although I don't think (in your case with a 2.4GHz celeron vs. 400MHz) they
should be slower than any 400MHz PC, I do know that at anything requiring
calculations, the lack of cache on a celeron processor slows it down at a
very noticable rate. For example, I have processed video on a 1.8GHz P4
almost twice as fast as a 2.0GHz Celeron.
 
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