suggestions for computer optimization

[cdavid]

Hi, I've noticed that Pixinsight runs kina sluggish on my iMac 5k 27 inch retina late 2015 under El Capitan.  This is the 3.3 MHz intel core i5 system and it has 64gb of Ram.  I really thought pixinsight would fly on this system but even launching the program takes a good while for everything to load and startup.

I have read about creating swap disks in the Windows environment but not sure if anything is possible under the mac environment.  Any suggestions for optimizing my setup?

Thanks for any help!
Carlos

[pfile]

are you getting SPODs at all? i just upgraded to el capitan and i'm finding PI is frequently giving me the SPOD when interacting with file dialogs...

swap-wise, there's no platform dependency. you can point PI at multiple directories and it will spread its temporary files among those directories. i just installed a PCIe NVMe SSD (which is ridiculously fast - 500MB/s write, 1500MB/s read) and put 2 PI swap directories on it. it has definitely improved file I/O in PI.

rob

[cdavid]

Hi Rob, thanks for responding.  Yes I get the spinning beach ball frequently when opening files, loading scripts and the programs start up is painfully slow....it takes quite a while for all the scripts to load and the flash screen to finally go away.

Pardon my ignorance....how exactly do you create swap files in the mac environment?  I would like to try something along these lines.

thanks again
Carlos

[pfile]

OK... i guess there's some bad interaction between el capitan and PI; hopefully the forthcoming version will behave a little better, since i think Juan said he is moving to the next version of Qt.

anyway, they are really swap directories. there's a thread here somewhere where juan announced the feature, saying that if you've got an SSD then 2 or more swap directories are recommended. if you've got a rotational disk then you should only have one swap directory per disk drive.

anyway in the global preferences, click on "directories and network" you'll see the swap directory names at the top. there's a huge tooltip that describes how it should be set up - hover over the text that says "Swap storage directories" and you'll see it.

rob

[cdavid]

Thanks Rob....yup I've been to that area and saw "tmp" as the swap directory listed.  I'm going to try and create a second swap area and hope that it helps speed things up a bit.

thanks again
Carlos

[jkmorse]

Carlos,

With 64Gb of ram, you might also try a ramdisk.  I am a Windows guy and not sure if you can use a ramdisk with a Mac, but I have 32Gb of ram and built a 16Gb ramdisk that I point to 4 times and it's really fast.  With 64Gb you can easily accommodate a 32Gb ramdisk.  I also point to a couple of dedicated swap file locations on SDDs as Rob suggests as well.  When I run the benchmark test I actually get better numbers with just the ramdisk, but I like having a couple of large (128Gb) swap files available as well for real work. 

Best,

Jim-

[dzso.bacsi]

Carlos,

If you have 64GByte RAM, you should definitely try to use RAMDISK. If you set up  - for example - a 48GB disk, you left plenty for the system and you can put a swap onto your ramdisk. The link show you how to setup - forget the rest, it is about PS and Lightroom swap setup. The goal, however, is the same, speed up processing...
https://www.slrlounge.com/super-charge-lightroom-photoshop-ram-disk/

Cheers

[pfile]

thanks for that link - i've been using OS X for a billion years and didn't know that diskutil supported ram://<size> as a device!

my next machine will have 64GB so i will probably try it out then.

rob

[cdavid]

Awesome! thanks everyone, going to give this a try.

Carlos

[cdavid]

Hi everyone, so I created a Ram-Disk using the app....cool!  I pointed to it in the Pixinsight General Preferences area as instructed.  The question I have is- do you simply just point to the Ram Disk or do you need to create a directory in the Ram Disk to point to?

I ran the Benchmark a few times and noted improvement, I also ran through some imaging files and also noted a modest improvement.  The start up beach ball issue and a long delay while quitting the application is still present but the processing has definitely speed up.

Carlos

[msmythers]

Carlos

A folder should not be needed. You might need to point to the ram disk several times to see the best results. Use the PixInsight Benchmark script as a guide to when you have the best result. I have a couple of SSD's on my system and the screen shoot shows what gave me the best results for my hardware. Yours will be different but I would expect more then just one.

Mike

[cdavid]

Thanks Mike!

[dzso.bacsi]

Hi Carlos,

+1 for Mike, you can achieve better performance with more than one swap. Simply point several times to the ramdisk. You can use benchmark to fine tune the number.

Cheers

[whwang]

This whole ramdisk idea seems weird to me.  Normally I would expect an app to write things to disk swap space when there is not enough RAM to store data.  Now you guys are trying to reduce the amount of RAM that's directly available to the app, and ask it when it feels there is not enough of RAM, write things to the RAM disk?  This only makes sense when the directly accessible RAM to PI is limited, so you use the remaining RAM as RAM disk.  Is this the case?  Do I miss anything?

Another thing that I have been told is that OSX makes good use of RAM.  When the system needs to write a page file, it will first check whether there is RAM available.  If yes, it writes to the RAM rather than the disk.  So the general advice is not to use RAM disk for the system.  This is for the system.  I am not sure whether this applies to apps.

The original complain about PI here is the program loading time.  I think the only reasonable solution to this is to use an SSD as a boot disk and system disk.   If Carlos indeed has an SSD in his iMac and the loading time for PI is still painfully slow, then something is seriously wrong, and this almost should have nothing to do with RAM disk.

My 2 cents.

Cheers,
Wei-Hao

[msmythers]

Wei-Hao

The use of a ramdisk and multiple swap storage pointers is a proven method in PI to speed up operations even in a Mac environment.

You might want to check out this link.
http://www.pixinsight.com/sysreq/index.html#Parallel_Swap_Storage

A while back a benchmark script was created. This posting is worth a complete read as people discus the use of the swap storage on different systems and their results.
http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=7083.0

We are just giving suggestions to Carlos to try that are easy and based on others configurations where ramdisks have made huge differences with PI on all OS's. If the suggestions don't work it's no harm. Then he can explorer other avenues.


Mike