CPU@ 50%

Jose M. Estrada wrote on 6/27/2005, 7:30 PM
Can somebody help me with this! I finished my editing of a cotillion, my project is 2 Hrs long.When I save it to my hard drive as an AVI. file it takes 20 Hrs to do the rendering. Then, when I open Task Manager, I found that VMS is just using 50% of CPU and SYSTEM IDLE PROCESS is using the other 50%, I set Priority to Programs, then Reboot and still same thing. Spot , Farss.

Comments

allyn wrote on 6/27/2005, 8:09 PM
then you're probably i/o bound. it might go faster if you added another hard drive.
Jose M. Estrada wrote on 6/29/2005, 9:15 AM
Allyn, forgot to mention that my PC has 2 HDD. 1)20Gigs 2)180Gigs CPU Pentium 4 3.2 GHz. HT enable. Another machine that I work with is: 1)80 Gigs 2)120 Gigs. CPU Pentium 4 2.4 GHz. Non HT. And when rendering with 2nd machine a 2 Hr project takes no longer than 4.5 Hrs. Any ideas. TIA.
ADinelt wrote on 6/29/2005, 11:10 AM
Here are some things that may help identify what is going on.

1) Identify what is different between the two PCs. (e.g. Operating System, other software that may be running, etc.)

2) Take the exact same project and render on both computers, then compare the times between the two.

3) You said one computer has Hyper Threading and the other does not. Is it possible to disable the Hyper Threading on the one compputer, then run your comparisons again?

Hope this helps...
Al
Jose M. Estrada wrote on 6/29/2005, 12:24 PM
Same OS.(SP1 in Trouble PC, SP2 in Good PC) ADinelt, you think this has something to do with PC's behaving this way?
ADinelt wrote on 6/29/2005, 1:55 PM
Kind of hard to say if it is a SP1 vs. SP2 issue or not. I am not a big fan of Windows XP anyway.

I just did a test at home rendering a small video clip (around 4 minutes in length), and it took around 9 minutes to render. I have a P4 2.4 GHz PC, 512 MByte RAM, a separate 120 GByte drive for video and the CPU Usage was at 100%.

When you render the project on the Good PC, what is the CPU Usage at? I really don't know much about Hyper Threading, but it seems kind of strange that the CPU Usage on the HT machine is at 50%. Is it possible that your PC is using only half of its capacity due to the Hyper Threading? Perhaps someone more knowledgable can answer that.

Al
Jose M. Estrada wrote on 6/29/2005, 6:04 PM
Al,when I do a render in Good PC CPU always is @100% useage by/for VMS. As I stated before, same project, effects, etc, etc. in PC with P4 2.4 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 120 Gigs video drive= 4.5 Hrs render. Well, I think I'll install SP2 in the "lazy" PC and see what happen. Thanx.
IanG wrote on 6/30/2005, 1:00 AM
Do the two PCs have the same memory / page file / buffer configs? Is it possible that you've disabled DMA for your disks on the "bad" PC? If your BIOS allows you to toggle the hyperthreading it's probably worth switching it off, just to see what happens.

Ian G.
gogiants wrote on 6/30/2005, 7:24 AM
You've probably already checked this, but just in case...

Are you rendering to the "non-system" or 2nd hard drive?

Is your project set up such that your temporary files folder is also on the 2nd drive? (Look at "File | Project Properties" and click on the "Folders" tab.)

Either one of these might cause lots of activity on the system disk, and thus make you I/O bound instead of CPU bound.
Jose M. Estrada wrote on 6/30/2005, 9:22 AM
Same memory/page file/buffer configs. I've had not check if DMA is enable or not. I'll check it tonight. Thanks guys. I appreciate al of your help.
Jose M. Estrada wrote on 6/30/2005, 9:27 AM
Gogiants, rendering is in video drive.I going to check that tonight and I'll let you guys know the results tomorrow.Thanks for your help.