Vista - Performance tuning

wwoods,

Processor folding in AIX has to do with virtual processors, not physical processors. It does not even come close to applying in this situation.

Excel is inefficient. That's the problem. To "fix" this issue, Excel would have to be changed.

S-

I understand that, but the concept/idea is the same, maximise use of the cpu. And I agree excell would need to re-worked, but my point was the OS itself is not desinged to use CPU's in that way.

wwoods,

Basically, processor folding in AIX allows the hypervisor to take physical CPU cycles away from idle virtual processors and apply them to active virtual processors thus increasing the performance of those virtual processors.

How does that concept apply here? I don't see it...

S-

I know Excel is the problem... I will have to live with what Excel does but if I could get longer time slices for Excel (get the OS out of the way and let Excel run as fast as it will) Would be nice if Excel had more busy threads but it does not. Excel does not update the screen as it works to save time but the screen update thread has plenty of clock cycles available.

Excel cannot use more than about 2.5 cores. The other 1.5 cores are there to do what ever else I want to do.
I can play music or watch video and still not push CPUs to 100% while Excel is running.

I will just have to wait for Excel to finish.

Thanks

exclude the process in your anti-virus for excel.exe. See if that helps.

I would like to have all the system "stuff" run in one CPU and not time slice the other cores/CPU where Excel is running unless the core is needed for something else, so far it has not been needed.

I would like to change the time slice on 3 cores to 1 second and see what happens.

I have 8 cores. 100% is all 8 cores are used. 50% is 4 cores used. 12.5% is 1 core used. Excel is not great at mutlicore work. Could you write it into C using a 2D arrray?

Ther is one answer right there - if you have any sort of real time scanning engine, it is scanning every time a single bit is written to the HD even in a temp folder process. Force Excel (or this one spreadsheet) to use a separate (and made for this purpose) temp directory, and then exclude that folder in your Scanning Engine(s)' real-time scanning. Also, priority will be a better tha nothing solution - unless you select real time processing (and even then it may not) you should not have a problem with getting locked out of your system.

Ahhh, but you can. It's called Linux.

Seriously, Windows is too proprietary to ever allow us that degree of freedom. I mean, come on, the HAL scans at every boot for added hardware to 'make out lives simpler' - and add something on the order of 15-200 seconds to our boot times.

With *nix I program what modules I want to load based upon the hardware I have installed and that shaves the average boot time by 1-1.5 minutes, depending upon distro.

Then again, I always did like compiling my own kernels in the first place....

In an other life I did tuning on SUN systems.
You could set up a batch task to run at a low priority and long time slices. If the system had time to run the low priority task it must not be that busy so let it run a while. The batch tasks would run faster in a lightly loaded system than if you ran them on the same system at a normal priority because there was a lot less system intervention. It only works in a multi CPU system so if there was high priority work to do before the long time slice expired an other CPU would run the slice. When thing got buys the background task would wait.

I was hoping vista was more open.

Thanks for all the input here.

You and me both, brother. Time slicing would be completely awesome on my rig and rigs more powerful than this....I could have 2 cores dedicate for my particular app, and let the other 2 handle DTD tasks and I'd be golden. I completely understand where you're coming from.

Alas, this is not Solaris . *nix....