trouble multitasking with c2d

[nyker96]

I recently built a modest 2.9Ghz E2160 machine. After using for a while I've discovered a serious flaw in multitasking. I don;t know if you guys ever see this on your c2d. When I start my machine in the morning. It does an auto backup and virus scan. So it's pretty heavy duty stuff. But the trouble is, during this time nothing else can be done, everything slows to a crawl on this box. At first I thought both cores are saturated, but turns out one core is at 100% other is near 0%. resulting in overall 50% ish load rating. It seems all my tasks are been run on this one core which is overloaded while other core is sitting unused, resulting in complete slow down of the machine. I am wondering why this is so, and how I can make the WIn XP OS split up the tasks more evenly between the cores, so to result in a more responsive machine. Even know I've got 2 cores, I felt like I'm using only one here.

 

[nullpointerus]

XP should do this automatically. Most likely your hard drive is the bottleneck: you are running two disk-intensive tasks (backup and virus scan) and then trying to load something else from the disc (i.e. Microsoft Word, Visual Studio, or a game). Furthermore, the more tasks you have accessing a hard drive, the less efficient the disk becomes, so running two tasks that would each take 5 sec. individually would take more like 15 seconds (total) when run simultaneously.

 

[nyker96]

yes, this is a very good point, however, that doesn't excuse the OS for putting ALL the tasks on one core and leave other one completely used. If it's split more evenly then at lease the entire system will be more responsive, even when I start a browser the OS puts it on the same core as other tasks. If the browser can go to the free core, it doesn't really use much HD so it would be lightening fast.

 

[SerpentRoyal]

Most programs are NOT coded for DC operation. Same with games. Core speed is still KING.

Virus scan is normally worthless if the AV is working properly (real time scanning). Only exception would be if the AV scan engine is not set to scan inside archive or MIME files. Naturally, if you extract these files, then the scan engine would intercept the malware.

I don't even run an AV full-time. Never had an infection.

 

[Game Boy]

Isn't there an XP hotfix to make it handle dual-core better?

 

[SerpentRoyal]

Yes...there's a 2233KB patch for DC at the MSFT website. Don't see much improvement. The patch appears to address some speedstep issues when C1E and EIST are enabled in BIOS.

 

[nyker96]

That's too bad, I have done a few more testing on this rig, it's utterly nuts how the machine just load up on one core when I have a few intensive tasks then only use the second core when the first is completely saturated. I mean is there even a way to force some tasks be run on the second core manually if the automatically mechanism for deciding this is so deficient, if I can split tasks manually would be a big improvement. I think I'm way smarter than the OS in deciding how to use the 2 cores properly.

Anyone know a way to manually instruct the win xp to run some tasks per core?

 

[nullpointerus]

Right-click on the taskbar, select Task Manager, switch to the Processes tab, and set the processor affinity of individual processes as you wish.

Tasks are mainly sequential; if the process tells the OS to load something from disk, and that takes 3 seconds because extremely disk-intensive processes like virus scans and backup operations are hogging the disk, then the process in question will use up 0% of the CPU while it is waiting for the disk access to complete.

Even something like loading a browser, which is not (very) disk-intensive, can take much longer to complete when another process is hogging the disk on which the browser's program files are located.

If you want to test the OS's process scheduler, why don't you load ONLY tasks that are NOT disk-intensive?

 

[GuitarDaddy]

As others have stated your problem is disk access not CPU. And your older 7200.7 drive is not helping matters. I would suggest adding a second faster drive and load OS and programs on it and move your data and the windows swap file to the older drive. And ditch the virus scan on startup, it's just not necessary in most cases. If you make those two changes you will see a world of difference

 

[AllGamer]

get a good set of WD Raptors HDD, and you will have nothing to worry about.

on my rig i can scan virus, and 3 other spy wares scans are going on, and do other stuff like playing MMO games without a problem, meanwhile recording a TV show in the back.

 

[nyker96]

I'll give it a shot with a new raptor when get a chance to buy it on sale. thanks guys, I still think this is bit suspicious with one core maxed and one core idling. Anyways will do a bit more digging.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Even with my C2D at 2.8Ghz, sometimes when I'm shrinking two DVDs at once, suddenly, my CPU usage will go from 100% on both cores to something much less. It's because the HD starts thrashing, competing for access for both programs. Probably something similar is going on here. Some process would ordinarily use the CPU, but doesn't, because it's waiting on the HD. Sadly, HDs are not dual-core.

 

[AlucardX]

Originally posted by: AllGamer
get a good set of WD Raptors HDD, and you will have nothing to worry about.

on my rig i can scan virus, and 3 other spy wares scans are going on, and do other stuff like playing MMO games without a problem, meanwhile recording a TV show in the back.

++

 

[Crassus]

One other thing: Did you do a complete reinstall of XP when you moved to c2d or did you just pop in your old system? If you did the latter, I'd think that wouold be the source of the issue.

 

[nyker96]

Originally posted by: Crassus
One other thing: Did you do a complete reinstall of XP when you moved to c2d or did you just pop in your old system? If you did the latter, I'd think that wouold be the source of the issue.

yes I did do a complete reinstall. But I think perhaps other gentlemen has it correct about the HD wait is forcing all process to be on this single core, although I am unsure why the processes could not get into wait state on separate cores. But anyhow I suppose I'm in for a raptor as my next upgrade option.

 

[Puffnstuff]

I used to think that my opteron 175 was fast until I went c2d and was I ever wrong. My c2d is 100% faster on video/file decoding plus it can run vista ultimate x64 without blinking. I can play games and decode files simultaneously which is nice. C2D won me back from amd as I was a fanboy for many years, 14 to be exact. I never considered going back to intel until they released this cpu.