PI Performance, SSD, Virus scanners

[georg.viehoever]

Hi,
I thought the following experiments I did with a new Windows 8.1 PC might be of general interest. In essence they show that
- Switching Windows from Balanced to High Performance mode has no influence on speed
- Switching PI priority from Time Critical to normal has no influence on speed
- Creating multiple swap files on a single SSD gives a nice performance boost
- Adding a virus scanner (ESET)  considerably slows down the system

Note that I dont recommend running Windows without virus scanner. If the system is connected to the internet, a virus scanner is mandatory!

Below a summary of the results, the details can be found in http://pixinsight.com/benchmark/
Georg

Benchmark Serial Number	Total	CPU	Swap	Transfer (MiB/s)	Total time(s)	Remark
2R9VD69O55T40BRQ30921ALUDV1II4J6	5279	6679	2833	511.46	89.11	Baseline with fresh Windows and PI with defaults
TSF2T9N3V4QUMNQUU6165LT71446I38M	5904	6740	3908	705.52	79.67	plus multiple swap files
6Q74TKAW6R803MRFV73XDSEO76A14VM2	5486	6204	3714	670.61	85.75	plus virus scanner

[vicent_peris]

Hi Georg,

Very interesting. Regarding the multi-threaded swapping, it also helps a lot in my laptop system. As I'm running in Linux, usually single-threaded swapping running in RAM gives me around 2 GB/s. If I select 4 threads in the same folder (/tmp), it rises to 3 GB/s.

Have you experimented by putting different number of threads? It's good to find how many threads perform better with your system.


Best regards,
Vicent.

[georg.viehoever]

No, I did not yet do any systematic tests with different numbers of swap files. Anyone interested in doing this?
Georg

[NGC7789]

I have done this. On my system (i7 4770k running Ubuntu) my best swap performance came from two threads each for two swap sources (ram disk and SSD). I've tried more threads (3 and 4 per source) as well as uneven (3 ram disk 2 ssd and vice versa). All performed worse. I wonder if it has something to do with the number threads being equal to the number of cores.

-Josh

[jkmorse]

I am running on Windows 8.1 as well.  I saw my biggest boost with my new SSD when I went to six swap files (set up in an empty 128Gb partition).  Significant improvement over four.  Also tried 8 but that degraded performance.  My laptop has an i7 core so its definitely not a match between number of cores and swap files, at least on my machine.  In any event Georg, its worth playing around with this aspect.

For what its worth.

Jim