Optimizing your Computer

[sreilly]

Currently my image processing computer is comprised of a Asus P8Z68-V Pro motherboard using an Intel i7-2600K 3.40 GHz processor and 32 GBs of DDR3 1866 RAM. My boot drive is a Samsung SSD 850 EVO 1TB drive and I have a Samsung SSD 840 EVO 500GB drive as a scratch drive. The Video card is an EVGA NVidia GeForce GTX 750 TI and I have two monitors connected, one via Display Port (BenQ GW2765) and the NEC MultisyncLCD2490WUXi via DVI connection. I also have four additional regular SATA hard drives installed, 2 are 1 TB Western Digitals, 1 3 TB Western Digital, and a Western Digital 640 GB drive. As mentioned the Samsung EVO 840 500 GB drive is a scratch drive as is the 640 GB Western digital drive. Both are set up in the Global preferences as scratch drive under Directories & Network. Are there any additional settings that should be changed to optimize the system for image processing. Everything is checked in Parallel Processing & Threads with Time Critical chosen for Max module thread priority.

I do have the C drive (Samsung SSD 850 EVO) set in Samsung's Magician drive configuration software to Rapid Mode. That does not allow the scratch drive to operate in Rapid Mode as only one SSD can.

I just want to be sure I'm getting the best performance for the processing. The current project has me working with 60-15 minute images of M51 from my STL-11002M camera, almost 21MB for each raw file and double that for calibrated (saved as 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point fits).

Thanks for any input.

Steve

[NGC7789]

have you set up your swap for parallel file storage was per this link?

http://www.pixinsight.com.ar/en/docs/124/pixinsight-parallel-swap-file-storage.html

You need to experiment with combinations of ssd/hard drive and how many threads on each gives you the best performance. On my system I traded overall swap size for speed and chose to use a ram disk and ssd for my swap. According to the benchmark this gives 5.5GB/s although limits to 32GB of swap (total swap is the smallest swap source time the number of sources). I often seen higher numbers in the console and I have never gotten errors for running out of swap. Keep in mind that this is a Linux setup and I don't know if you can achieve similar with Windows.

Which brings up a second point. If your machine is dedicated to image processing with PI consider Linux. I used OS X. When I built a hackintosh I decided to try out Linux and was surprise how much better it performed (50%!). I now have a dual boot setup and do all my PI work on Linux.