Optimizing Hardware Settings

[sreilly]

I built a new image processing computer several months ago and it screams compared to the one it replaced. The new computer now has an Intel i7 2600K processor, 16 GBs of RAM, a very good 1GB video card, Windows 7 Pro 64 bit, and plenty of hard drive space. The only improvement I could think might help is installing a solid state hard drive and they haven't come down enough yet for me and I'm waiting to see how well they last. I see the warranty is the same as my SATA drives, 3-5 years, but expected more due to the lack of moving parts. Anyway, I really wonder if I have PixInsight setup properly to take advantage of the power of this system. While it does work very fast, could it be better? I have the default settings as PixInsight installs. Could I or should I tweak any of these settings? I should mention that I use a STL-11000 camera and do not bin any exposures so my individual image frames are 20 MBs each and it's nothing to have 40-60 images being aligned at one time and integrating as many as 20 or more for individual master frames for red, green, blue, and luminance. When I start PI it does tell me:

* Parallel processing enabled: Using 8 logical processors.
* Thread CPU affinity control enabled.
* PSM AutoSave enabled. Auto-save period: 30 seconds.

Any thoughts very appreciated.

[sdh]

Hi,

Just a quick comment that my SSD has improved my system performance in ways I did not anticipate.

Bottom line: For me, speed is not an issue with PixInsight. My own ignorance, yes. Speed? No.
The rest of my system is brand-name, off-the-shelf, zero mods, about $700. Just one less nuisance.

Cheers,
Steven

[ManuelJ]

Overclock your CPU to at least 4,5 GHz. Buf if you brought a 2600k, it's 99% probably that you have already done that.

[Juan Conejero]

Steve,

This machine is an excellent platform for PixInsight. The best thing you can do to improve PI's performance is enabling parallel disk I/O for swap files. Swap files are temporary data structures generated by the PixInsight Core application to store image states. For example, a swap file is created each time you execute a process on an image, so you can undo/redo the process later.

To use parallel disk I/O:

- Install two or more *physical* disk drives on your machine. They can be cheap SATA drives, for example some spare old drives that you have from previous machines.

- Run the Preferences process (Edit > Global Preferences) and select the 'Directories and Network' item on the left column. Place the mouse cursor over the 'Swap storage directories' area and read the tooltip information. Ideally, no swap data should be stored on the same drive where you have your operating system installed.

With 2 - 4 physical disks used for parallel swap file storage, undo/redo operations will work basically in real time, just as if all the data were stored in RAM. If the disks are solid state devices, well, much better but also a much more expensive solution.

[sreilly]

Juan,

Thanks for that information. I currently have two physical drives installed but have a couple of smaller (320/640 GB drives) not being used that I can install for this purpose. As for overclocking, I really don't get into that as about the most gaming I do is Spider Solitaire!

Thanks,

Steve

[Raymond]

Juan,
thanks for that hint! Besides my laptop, I use sometimes an external disk drive. My question is: can I add this one as a second drive (swap storage direct.) although it is only occasionally connected to my laptop?

[Juan Conejero]

... about the most gaming I do is Spider Solitaire!

I am a minesweeper addict. I have to recognize this little game is the only thing I miss from Windows ... luckily it has been ported to Linux

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Raymond,

can I add this one as a second drive (swap storage direct.) although it is only occasionally connected to my laptop?

You can use an external drive for swap storage, but PI will fail if it is not available.

If you use an external disk, it should be connected through a high-speed interface. eSATA works perfectly. USB3 should also work well but I haven't tested it. USB2 and FireWire definitely cannot be used for PI swap storage because they are too slow.

[Raymond]

Hi Juan
Thanks for your comment.
Beside the professional module descriptions, this online help by you and many others is absolutely exemplary!