so anyone bored and want to help me find out what the bottleneck of my system is?

[LongCoolMother]

well, since im downloading a lot of stuff right now, my computer is really getting sluggish. i was wondering what my next upgrade should be.... i want to mainly improve performance in the OS, while running applications and such.


winxp home
P4 2.4GHz no OC
16x DVD 48x CDRW 4X DVD-R
386MB PC2100 (supports pc2700)
2x 40GB Maxtor HDDs 7200RPM
Radeon 8500 made by ATI
Creative Audigy

so which do you guys think would be the best upgrade? i dont game much, so i dont really care too much for the video card. i would upgrade it, but most good video cards are too expensive right now. it functions fine enough for the occasional games i play. im thinking its time to move up on the memory, perhaps to 512MB PC2700. you think that will help the bottlenecks while using the system? what do you think?

 

[Lyfer]

Get 512mb - 1gb of ram.

 

[tokamak]

IMO that sytem should not get sluggish when downloading things. that being said, ram seems like the weak link...

 

[FishTankX]

Tell me, what are you using to download? Kazaa? Edonkey? Or just through MIE?

If you use Kazaa or Edonkey the combination of downloads (Swarming, I might add. Which adds even more load.) and uploads which may or may not be at the same parts of the disk, are what's causing the slowdowns. In that case, maybe a raptor is up your alley.

Otherwise, just get more RAM.

But the fastest way to improve performance is always a reformat. A clean system always runs clean.

 

[FishTankX]

Also, buying a stick of 128 DDR isn't worthit it at the time. If you wanna splurge on RAM, 256 or even 512 is never too much. 512 would land you 896 MB of RAM, enough to build a big enough system cache to contain all the downloading activity.

 

[LongCoolMother]

yea, fishtank, you're right. im swarming many bit torrent files. these are very large files too. uploading around 20kb/sec. and grabbing at 400+ yes, linux

emule is goin too, i think its because my HDD cant keep up with the upload and download.... heh heh heh

 

[FishTankX]

Running 2 file sharing programs at once will kill your performance.

The read head constantly has to jump between 3 or 4 (Upload 1 download 1 upload 2 download 2) locations on the disk. This will make the system incredibly sluggish.

In your situation I would reccomend a much faster hardrive (more cache is probably better. 8MB is reccomended). And perhaps more RAM.

Running Kazaa and pulling 300K/s and uploading 400K/s was enough to make my system nearly unusable. And i'm running specs slightly below yours. (Well, alot below yours on the CPU, but 256MB of RAM.)

The best way to deal with the issue is throw a faster disk into the system. RAID probably won't do you any good with this kind of situation.

 

[magomago]

How about Ram? That Pentium 4 is probably starved for bandwith

 

[FishTankX]

Also, one of the fastest ways to improve your disk performance is to keep your file sharing on a SCSI subsystem. Trust me, this will make a world of difference. Unfortunatley, it's probably beyond your price point.

 

[LongCoolMother]

Originally posted by: FishTankX
Running 2 file sharing programs at once will kill your performance.

The read head constantly has to jump between 3 or 4 (Upload 1 download 1 upload 2 download 2) locations on the disk. This will make the system incredibly sluggish.

In your situation I would reccomend a much faster hardrive (more cache is probably better. 8MB is reccomended). And perhaps more RAM.

Running Kazaa and pulling 300K/s and uploading 400K/s was enough to make my system nearly unusable. And i'm running specs slightly below yours. (Well, alot below yours on the CPU, but 256MB of RAM.)

The best way to deal with the issue is throw a faster disk into the system. RAID probably won't do you any good with this kind of situation.

thanks for the help fishtank. had no idea running p2p programs simotaneously would have a large performance hit. completely makes sense now. no wonder downloading mutiple files kills performance. thanks, i guess ill use my other computer to download the other files.

on another thought. theoretically, would i be able to relieved the stress on the HDs if say i was running emule and kazaa. i let kazaa save the files on my secondary 40GB HD. and emule on my primary HD. they are seperate so there shouldnt be as much overload right?

 

[ZimZum]

I have run winmx, edonkey and kazaa at the same time without much of a performance hit. The key is limiting the upload bandwidth and simultaneous users.

 

[FishTankX]

ZimZum:True, but I don't do that out of consideration for others.

When you do that, you're contributing to WinMX's massive queing problems.

I believe one of his problems is that Bit Torrent doesn't allow for limiting of any sort, if I remember correctly.

EMule probably does. You could try cutting back on the number of simeltaneous uploads and put up a bandwidth cap. Again, that's up to you.

 

[Vonkhan]

get 512mb - 1 GB pc2700

invest in a good cpu cooler and OC the sucka

what mobo u got?

 

[SpeedFreak03]

I have eDonkey2000 and WinXP (on a P3 500, 384MB PC100), and had a WDC 30GB 7200RPM drive. When I upgraded to my WDC 80GB 7200RPM with 8MB Cache I noticed a HUGE difference in performance. BTW, my drives run at ATA33.

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Originally posted by: LongCoolMother
well, since im downloading a lot of stuff right now, my computer is really getting sluggish. i was wondering what my next upgrade should be.... i want to mainly improve performance in the OS, while running applications and such.


winxp home
P4 2.4GHz no OC
16x DVD 48x CDRW 4X DVD-R
386MB PC2100 (supports pc2700)
2x 40GB Maxtor HDDs 7200RPM
Radeon 8500 made by ATI
Creative Audigy

so which do you guys think would be the best upgrade? i dont game much, so i dont really care too much for the video card. i would upgrade it, but most good video cards are too expensive right now. it functions fine enough for the occasional games i play. im thinking its time to move up on the memory, perhaps to 512MB PC2700. you think that will help the bottlenecks while using the system? what do you think?

Most likely the RAM size during lots of applications. For multi tasking a 2.4C with Hyper Threading would better, but really the 2.4Ghz should be fine. Are those HDD's in a Raid config or on their own? What model # are they as well? If you're still on the 4E20L0 or whatever that model number for one of Maxtor's drives is, you may want to ugprade that. That drive I mentioed is quiet and 7200RPM but its not anywhere near as fast. Getting a newer 8mb cache may even double the performance on that drive I mentioned in bootup and loading times.

 

[ZimZum]

Originally posted by: FishTankX
ZimZum:True, but I don't do that out of consideration for others.

When you do that, you're contributing to WinMX's massive queing problems.

I believe one of his problems is that Bit Torrent doesn't allow for limiting of any sort, if I remember correctly.

EMule probably does. You could try cutting back on the number of simeltaneous uploads and put up a bandwidth cap. Again, that's up to you.

I think its better to limit uploads to say 10 users that will get decent DL speeds rather than have 30 downloading at
the same time getting a measly 0.68kbps. Unless youre on a T3 line or something.

 

[FishTankX]

Originally posted by: ZimZum

Originally posted by: FishTankX
ZimZum:True, but I don't do that out of consideration for others.

When you do that, you're contributing to WinMX's massive queing problems.

I believe one of his problems is that Bit Torrent doesn't allow for limiting of any sort, if I remember correctly.

EMule probably does. You could try cutting back on the number of simeltaneous uploads and put up a bandwidth cap. Again, that's up to you.

I think its better to limit uploads to say 10 users that will get decent DL speeds rather than have 30 downloading at
the same time getting a measly 0.68kbps. Unless youre on a T3 line or something.

Well I personally am on a super high bandwidth connection that provides 10 megabits up (which I have hit realworld before) but that might not be the ame for cable and DSL users, in which case yes. I would suggest limiting it to maybe 10 users or so.

In the end it doesn't really matter because if you limit it to fewer users then you finish the uploads faster.