Over the last winter I built what I thought would be an industrial-strength computer. Dual quad-core AMD Opterons, 16 gig Ram (8 per cpu) a 60 gig SSD where Win 7 and only a few applications live.
If you want to see the build diary on it, look here:
Dreadnought
I'm running Win Pro build 7600.
I'm really disappointed with the performance. I look at the WEI and it tells me that I should be deliriously happy. I'm not.
If I've done this right, the WEI and CPU-Z screen dumps should be attached.
A little background. I had to retire a few years back due to some health issues. But I've been workin with computers since 1966. I started out on vacuum-tube analog beasts and when I retired, I'd spent the previous 20 years as a developer/analyst. Prior to that I worked as a hardware tech on everything from calculators to mainframes.
Now I'm a freelance photographer and I'm still doing web development work, even if I can't do as much as I used to.
Back to the disappointment. When I look at just about anything like ResMon, I see that between 3 and 4 gig of RAM is actually being used. The rest is always shown as "available." I can see all processor cores getting activity, but memory usage never changes...or if it does, it's only by a few hundred meg.
I can't say that the box always runs like a dog. And I didn't expect it to be blindingly fast. What I wanted was a box that I could throw a lotta processes at and not have it drop to its knees and beg for mercy. Unfortunately, that's exactly what it's doing. Many of the issues involve Firefox. (V3.63) It's rolled over and died more times in the last month than all the baby seals in Canada.
I've backed all but a very few add-ons out of it. And I don't use any real fancy add-ons. And I limit it to two instantiations of the program running at any given time. Unfortunately, it's re-entrant code so the 2nd instantiation doesn't show up as its own process. I tried using Chrome (what a joke) and Opera (for all their protestations about rigid adherence to ISO standards, that browser just doesn't render things correctly.) And I'll only use IE if it's the very last option.
But it's not just a browser issue. I run two monitors and have a GPU that otta be able to handle 'em. I've disabled almost all of the Aero stuff yet when I run 2 instances of ACDSee v11 (2009) and one instance of version 7 (I do that because when one of the V11 instantiations goes to sleep, it takes the other one with it. Once again, re-entrant code is nice but it sure ain't well-suited to multi-threading) eventually it'll start to quit displaying images, hang up while indexing thumbnails and other cute little things like just throwing its hands in the air and displaying a message that says it's stopped working. Well. How bout that. I kinda had a sneaking suspicion about that when I found that it wasn't working any more. And if it scrambles the task bar one more time, I may format the sucker and install linux...except that linux isn't mature enough to do what I need and not have to be a linux guru every time I need to run a different application, apt-get or whatever notwithstanding, it's still built by committee and is too inconsistent in its interface and conventions.
I run a few other things. I prefer Corel's Paint Shop Pro Photo to Photoshop so I use it. If I have to I'll run Dreamweaver, but most of the time I run ACEHtml to do web stuff and ThumbsPlus V7 (I tried V8 but it's so buggy and undocumented, it was just a waste of money.)
So I throw a lotta stuff at it, but that's what I built it for. Here's what's happening. I believe that the same problem that's existed since Window 95 is still there: a limited number of GDI handles and no way to free them up.
Right now I have 16 applications open. That results in 950 threads and almost 29000 handles. I believe (but I can't prove it) that when the number of handles reaches 32767 (Hex 7fff) I start getting "out of resource" errors. This happens about twice a day. If I understand correctly, there's also a memory leak that was never fixed from beta days. The only redeeming factor is that with the SSD it doesn't take as long as it could to reboot.
I know my box is IO-bound with the SATA drives, but at the moment I can't come up with a different way of doing things other than to create a completely new disk sub-system using a RAID 3 or 4 configuration. Right now I don't have the time to do that. It's my busy season as a photographer and I won't have time until November or later. So I have to put up with that.
I've done my best to minimize unneeded processes and have very little in the startup locations (registry or folders.)
But the use of memory and processing resources, plus the handles issue seem to be holding this box back from performing like it should.
If anyone can offer some insight on how to un-throttle this thing, I'd be very grateful.
RtR
