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Processor performance on panoramic image processing

F

Fike

Senior member
I have an Athlon XP 1600 + with 768 MB of RAM that seems to be choking on some heavy processing. I am running a program called PTAssebler for stitching panoramic and mosaic images together. The resulting image files are frequently larger than 300 MB.

see Max Lyons Tawbaware
or Gallery of VERY high resolution images

I am comparing a task that takes less than 20 seconds on someone elses 1800+ with the same task taking over 5 minutes on my pc. I have looked at the task manager to see that the processor remains at 100% utilization for the duration of the task while the memory is kept at around 30% utilization (I have 768 MB of RAM).

I have a few hypothesis about the cause of this problem:

1) I am using PC2100 (256 MB) and PC2700 (512 MB) RAM at the same time. this could cause a slight decline because the memory should all be operating at the slower speed, but this would not seem to cause a decline in performance of the magnitude that is at issue here.

2) My hard drive is running at ATA 33. I am going to get an 80 wire cable to up that to ATA100 (the limit of my hard drive), but again, that doesn't seem like something that could cause performance degradation of the magnitude I have described.

Both of the issues I describe seem to be the type of things that cause decreases in ideal performance in the range of 5-10 %, not the 1000% I am currently experiencing.

Any ideas where else I can look to solve this issue.
 
trying to move those big files at ATA33 speed is a strangler , and what size cache does your HDD have? That KG7 in your sig is also a really old chipset and you have a lower clocked CPU as well. Would you know the specs of the 1800+ system? a 8mb cache hdd on a newer chipset alone would be a significant performance boost when working with big files.
 
Thanks for the suggestions. I know I need to upgrade. I am just trying to figure out what components will make the most sense. The particular procedure I am using is shown in the windows performance monitor screen below. I think this points to seek times on the hard drive more than throughput. I have replaced the IDe cable, but I haven't seen any improvement on this process.

Performance graph

As far as where to put my money, these results suggest that a more powerful processor would help, but the biggest help would be in a very fast serial ATA hard drive. Unfortunately that would mean that I would need to upgrade my Mboard and processor first. I am also considering getting a 1 Gig RAM chip to improve photoshop performance. So I am in the $400 or $500 range. Oh well. I guess I just need to get started. First-things-first, a new Mboard and processor. I think this does suggest that an XP 64 3000 will be more than satisfactory.

Any suggestions,
thanks,
 
control pane > system > hardware > IDE/ATAPI devices, for both primary and secondary, look at the advanced settings tab.
 
Originally posted by: 3chordcharlie
control pane > system > hardware > IDE/ATAPI devices, for both primary and secondary, look at the advanced settings tab.
Click to expand...

thanks. It is on.
 
After further investigation.....someone at another board suggested that I have a classic pagefile thrashing condition where it is constantly using the hard drive as virtual memory. So, a stick RAM would probably solve this problem. (I will still be doing the upgrade in the next few months though). I ran a test that kind of confirmed that the hard drive was NOT the issue. I could copy the 16 images that totaled 56 MB from my RAID drives to my IDE boot drive in less than 5 seconds. I don't think that access times are really the issue.

 
Originally posted by: ComatoseDelirium
get an amd 64.
Click to expand...

That's the plan. Memory first. Motherboard and processor second. I had planned to get the new motherboard and a Athlon 64 3000 first. I would have been pissed if I got the new sysem and the bottleneck was the RAM that I transferred from the old system to the new. this way I can wait a few more weeks to see if the 3000s come down a bit in price. I really want a winchester 300+ but I am setting $200 as an arbitrary budget for the mboard and processor. I do everything incrementally.

fike

 
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