Performance Discussion - The Biggest Bottleneck

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Originally posted by Arcadian:
If that's true, than how come Windows 2000, which is pure 32bit and 0% DOS, doesn't go that much faster than Windows 98 or ME?

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It does.

E.g. everything that deals with graphics is faster. Given half a decent (i.e. nothing from 3DFX these days) device driver, 2000 will sink 98 performance wise...

2000 sports better file systems, better disk I/O, etc...

But, NT has gotten bigger with the years. It has a pretty hefty shell (explorer is far from lightweight) so you need to give it lotsa room (128MB _minimum_).

It's also a lot smoother multitasking wise. (i.e. you can still do stuff while loading a huge app)

What it _won't_ do is count faster or put differently: Anything CPU bound will still be CPU bound (but NT is better at distributing CPU to other tasks that might require it).

Greatly simplified of course, but you get the gist of it.

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Rune

Well, Ill put my 2 1/2 cents in. What the blonde dude on page one said is right. The hard drive, and really, non-volatile storage media period is the biggest bottleneck on performance.
Think hard drives are slow, look at the CD-ROM. Think thats slow, look at the floppy drive!
Im gonna try this sometime. I have 320MB RAM. Somehow, I would like to set up a 200MB RAM Drive and do a full install of Jedi Knight to it. Right now, even with a 7200 RPM hard drive, every time it goes to load a new sound into memory (like the sound one of those three eyed ReeYees makes when it sees you-"Erderot-ray!"), the frame rate drops to almost nothing. Why? For that split second, its waiting for the hard drive to find and copy the sound to memory. But with a RAM Drive, all this would be instant.

By some chance, does anybody where I can find a utility like that? The ramdrive.sys that comes with windows only supports up to 32MB drives...

Dang. You guys work at Intel or what? I've logged many hours reading up on systems, and I still don't know crap about registers and the over head it produces, etc..

Anyway. Judging by constant disagreements from techs of ALL knowledge levels.. I think the simple approach is best: Who cares? Quit trying to fix whats broke, trash it, recreate a system architecture with today's technology, and an OS for it.

Yeah, yeah.. "real world" expenses and ramifications, whatever.. Microcrud is big enough to do whatever they want. Let alone Wintel.. https://www.sharkyforums.com/images/.../2005/06/6.gif

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Originally posted by LordZordec:
Well, Ill put my 2 1/2 cents in. What the blonde dude on page one said is right. The hard drive, and really, non-volatile storage media period is the biggest bottleneck on performance.

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It's not too hard to put together a drive system (think multiple drives striped together - RAID) that would outrun a regular PCI bus (133MB/s).

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Rune

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Originally posted by BikeDude:
It's not too hard to put together a drive system (think multiple drives striped together - RAID) that would outrun a regular PCI bus (133MB/s).

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Rune

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And just how many people do you think would do this in a PC? Say you had a RAID system (RAID5, for example, since RAID0 only works for 2 drives), and it was SCSI160, so you had enough bandwidth. Since drives typically can't sustain transfer rates of more than 20MB/s for any period of time (buffer runs out, etc), you would still need more than 5 drives to stress the bandwidth of the PCI bus. I don't know of any PCs that have more than 5 SCSI160 drives. https://www.sharkyforums.com/images/.../2005/06/5.gif

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Originally posted by Arcadian:
If that's true, than how come Windows 2000, which is pure 32bit and 0% DOS, doesn't go that much faster than Windows 98 or ME?

I think the software tries to scale with the hardware, and development times aren't likely to get any shorter. There is still a lot that can be improved in the hardware, so I believe that is still the bottleneck in performance.

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because win 2000 isn't designed for running games and such.......no matter how many people use it differently its still a netwroking os designed as a workstation platform to be stable rather than fast and is weoghed down by safety programs

M/soft had originnally planned for win me to be true 32 bit coding but had problems with the plug and play support so they scraped it and just rehashed and re-realesed win 98(win me)

Someone said it was the x86 architecture but the pentium pro which current processors are based was designed to be a little faster in 16bit and a lot faster in 32bit.....but we're still only using a 16/32 hybrid we are yet to realsise the full potential of our processors


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'From now on I'm thinking only of me.'

Major Danby replied indugently with a superior smile: 'But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way.'
'Then,' said Yossarian, 'I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any othe way wouldn't I?'

hell, i can tell ya what it is....metal interconnects. optical all the way! https://www.sharkyforums.com/images/.../2005/06/6.gif

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Compaq Armada E500
650MHz PIII 128MB RAM
8MB ATI rage mobility
11GB hard drive/DVD
dual booting win98/2k

who said you cant game on a notebook????

Quote:

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Originally posted by Arcadian:
Say you had a RAID system (RAID5, for example, since RAID0 only works for 2 drives), and it was SCSI160, so you had enough bandwidth. Since drives typically can't sustain transfer rates of more than 20MB/s for any period of time (buffer runs out, etc)

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First off, is RAID 0 (mirroring) really limited to only two drives? Who says you can't have two drives mirroring the first?

And don't forget, there's RAID 1 and 3 too...
(RAID 1 is IIRC, basically RAID 5 except it doesn't have any parity -- i.e. disk striping without parity in Windows NT lingo)

As for running out of buffers... Well, in theory the drives would get more time filling those buffers (seeing as load is distributed among the drives).

In addition you'd probably want to hook up to a DLT streamer as well. Those suckers want their piece of the bandwidth too.

You'd be lucky if you could service 5 disks and a DLT streamer using the PCI bus. There is a reason why they put 64 bit PCI bus in high-performance servers (and why Adaptec 2940U2W and 29160 supports 64 bit PCI).

(BTW: Sony's DTF-2 tape station claims 24MB/s data transfer rate, and I'm sure you can find plenty of disks that are faster than 20MB/s -- If I read Quantum Atlas 10K III's specs right, it should exceed 50MB/s)

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Rune

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Originally posted by colonel:
because win 2000 isn't designed for running games and such.......no matter how many people use it differently its still a netwroking os designed as a workstation platform to be stable rather than fast and is weoghed down by safety programs

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That doesn't explain why Windows 2000 scores better in Quake 3 compared to Win98, when both configurations use a NVidia based adapter...

Given good drivers and enough RAM, 2000 will beat 98.

(ATI, 3dfx and Matrox didn't have good drivers, atleast not a month or so back according to the benchmark I saw -- so using products from those vendors will effectively tie Win2k's hands)

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Rune

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Originally posted by BikeDude:
[B(BTW: Sony's DTF-2 tape station claims 24MB/s data transfer rate, and I'm sure you can find plenty of disks that are faster than 20MB/s -- If I read Quantum Atlas 10K III's specs right, it should exceed 50MB/s)
[/B]

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According to http://www.quantum.com/quantum/pc/pr/pr00101601.htm I did read the specs right. 54MB/s sustained.

So, two of those drives and a Sony tape drive, and your PCI bus is fully occupied handling all that SCSI action. Never mind what happens if you pop in one or two 100 mbit/s network cards.

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Rune

hard drives. when hard drives become hybrids with nonvolatile ram and disk in one we will see real increases. imagine loading your operating system and most common apps into ram, and turning your computer on and "booting" in 5 seconds. office apps opening virtually insantaneously.

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Originally posted by BikeDude:
First off, is RAID 0 (mirroring) really limited to only two drives? Who says you can't have two drives mirroring the first?

And don't forget, there's RAID 1 and 3 too...
(RAID 1 is IIRC, basically RAID 5 except it doesn't have any parity -- i.e. disk striping without parity in Windows NT lingo)

As for running out of buffers... Well, in theory the drives would get more time filling those buffers (seeing as load is distributed among the drives).

In addition you'd probably want to hook up to a DLT streamer as well. Those suckers want their piece of the bandwidth too.

You'd be lucky if you could service 5 disks and a DLT streamer using the PCI bus. There is a reason why they put 64 bit PCI bus in high-performance servers (and why Adaptec 2940U2W and 29160 supports 64 bit PCI).

(BTW: Sony's DTF-2 tape station claims 24MB/s data transfer rate, and I'm sure you can find plenty of disks that are faster than 20MB/s -- If I read Quantum Atlas 10K III's specs right, it should exceed 50MB/s)

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Rune

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Well, RAID 0 is striping, and RAID 1 is mirroring, and I believe RAID 5 is striping with parity. But anyways, my point is just what you said. Those that use the equipment you listed are probably trying to put together servers or powerful workstations, NOT PCs. That is why server motherboards come with 64bit PCI, or even better yet, 64bit/66MHz PCI, which has 4 times the bandwidth of standard PCI. I still don't think that PCs are at the point where more I/O bandwidth is necessary. Does anybody here plan to buy Quantum Atlas 10K III drives in their next PC?

Those planning on spending the money on two Quantum Atlas 10K III drives and a Sony tape drive, should spend another couple hundred $$$ and get this board here.
http://developer.intel.com/design/servers/stl2/

Quote:

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Originally posted by BikeDude:
That doesn't explain why Windows 2000 scores better in Quake 3 compared to Win98, when both configurations use a NVidia based adapter...

Given good drivers and enough RAM, 2000 will beat 98.

(ATI, 3dfx and Matrox didn't have good drivers, atleast not a month or so back according to the benchmark I saw -- so using products from those vendors will effectively tie Win2k's hands)

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Rune

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bike dude i was agreeing with you



------------------
'From now on I'm thinking only of me.'

Major Danby replied indugently with a superior smile: 'But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way.'
'Then,' said Yossarian, 'I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any othe way wouldn't I?'

Quote:

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Originally posted by Arcadian:
Well, RAID 0 is striping, and RAID 1 is mirroring, and I believe RAID 5 is striping with parity. But anyways, my point is just what you said. Those that use the equipment you listed are probably trying to put together servers or powerful workstations, NOT PCs. That is why server motherboards come with 64bit PCI, or even better yet, 64bit/66MHz PCI, which has 4 times the bandwidth of standard PCI. I still don't think that PCs are at the point where more I/O bandwidth is necessary. Does anybody here plan to buy Quantum Atlas 10K III drives in their next PC?

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Cheap ID raid controllers supporting RAID 0 and 1 (and 10) are becoming popular for desktop systems. I agree with you though that RAID is really only critical in some server systems. A properly configured desktop system should not need to access the HDD after loading the app.

Just a little information. Oracle does not recommend using RAID other then disk mirroring since a properly tuned Oracle database will get better performance if you do not use RAID.

Operating systems and bloatware....that's the biggest bottleneck
--all the garbage that eats memory and clock cycles......what a shame https://www.sharkyforums.com/images/.../2001/11/1.gif(