How do you multitask?

by Anand Lal Shimpi on 4/1/2005 12:35 PM EST
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  • Chris - Saturday, April 16, 2005 - link

    Firefox.
    Gaim.
    Xchat.
    ^Always running those.
    Sometimes running one or two of these:
    VNCviewer
    Anjuta
    Couple xterms
    Thunderbird


    My expectation is for my desktop to remain stable (Not need to login) for one full week. I usually shut down on the weekend because I think it's a bit silly to leave it on for 24-72 hours straight without being touched once. Very important that my desktop and the applications on it can run for at least a week at a time without a crash. Except for Gaim and Firefox, I can deal with an occasional crash there I suppose.
  • Jeff Ginger - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link

    Oh yeah - I run Norton and a soft access point at all times too.
  • Jeff Ginger - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link

    So I'm running an overclocked P4 with 2 videocards and three displays. The system just reeks of multitasking, even before I expound-

    Typical tasks include:

    Web Design:
    Display 1: FTP and file management for web sites
    Display 2 (primary): Web page editing (dreamweaver or frontpage) and toolboxes
    Display 3: Photoshop, Adobe LiveMotion, or Fireworks

    Casual Use:
    Display 1: CD burning software (Roxio 10)
    Display 2: Web browers (Mozilla or Opera)
    Display 3: WinAmp and Trillian windows

    Audio Recording and Editing:
    Display 1: Cakewalk Sonar
    Display 2: Sony Sound Forge
    Display 3: Volume control, EAX effects, and audioconversion tools (Cheetah converter or CDex)

    Email, online homework and writing papers:
    Display 1: Web browser (Mozilla or Opera or IE)
    Display 2: MS Word, Excell, Power Point or Email windows
    Display 3: WinAmp and Trillian windows again

    Programming and Web Development:
    Display 1: Web Browsers and Visual Studio.NET tool boxes
    Display 2: Visual Studio.NET
    Display 3: Visual Studio tool boxes, WinAmp

    Gaming:
    Nothing but display 2 with WinAmp, FRAPS, and whatever game I'm playing... maybe temperature probe stuff too.
  • SocrPlyr - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link

    #60
    you are explaining exactly what i was trying to get at in my previous post(#36) It isn't really about the blanket speed, it is more about the responsiveness of the system to be able to actually multitask, which isn't always possible w/ single core systems.

    Josh
  • DMZ - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link

    In Linux:
    Web, MySQL, and SSH serving while doing generic web browsing / office stuff, and sometimes while playing UT2004 OR burning discs. I'll usually have a music player going (xmms, rbox), too.

    In Windows:
    Playing games (heavy 3D) while using DirectConnect to grab and serve Linux ISOs. I also have some random system applets going as well (Logitech Bluetooth, nVidia, etc.). No anti-virus, though.

    I actually don't burn stuff while playing games, mostly because the consquences of failure are the worst.

    If I may make a request: I'd like to see benchmarks of the Xen Hypervisor when Pacifica / VT finally comes into play next year - I'm holding off on all upgrades because I _really_ want to see if it's the magic bullet to fix my dual boot solution.

    -DMZ
  • blwest - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link

    I run dual monitors, so it seems like I always have a lot going on:
    AutoCad 200x
    Photoshop
    I run linux in a VMware session.
    iTunes, playing music
    AIM
    Firefox w/10 tabs +/-
    Outlook
    Putty
  • dubb - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link

    I agree- it looks like alot of you are exagerating a bit.

    my most noticable speedup from running a dual 2.6 xeon over the old 3.2 P4 (aside from render times) is its ability to open several programs and stay responsive. For example, mostly I work in autocad and rhino, and then when things get close to being ready to go into presentation mode, fire up photoshop, illustrator, and indesign all at the same time. On the p4 I'd have to take a bathroom break, on the xeons I can keep working. Or generate a PDF from indesign and start the next thing in illustrator or photoshop.
  • Phlargo - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link

    Typical Multitasking Scenarios

    Desktop
    Updating an access database
    Writing a DVD
    Running 6 uploads on DC++ (I think this is very important because it really stresses my hard drives)
    Playing a movie or music in WinAmp or WMP10
    Chatting on AIM

    One of the biggest things I'd like to see is gaming while running something like DC++ in the background - tons of people are downloading files while playing their games and it severely affects performance.

    Notebook:
    Webbrowsing multiple tabs
    Writing in MS Word
    Virusscan or Updates
    Paying attention to my professors ;)

    This is a great idea - find out what people actually do, then test it. Perfect.
  • Vegitto - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link

    Encoding DVD's while playing games, and downloading mp3s and movies in the background...
  • Rand - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link

    My more intensive uses may have Opera open with 6-10 tabs. along with potentially Excel and Word.
    MS Outlook would likely be sitting in the tray, along with anti anti-virus and anti-spam application. I'll usually have GAIM running in the tray as well.

    ACDSee 7 could be open browsing images/doing batch file conversions.
    Adobe PhotoShop, and Adove ImageReady, along with Corel Draw.
    Acrobat 7 could also be open, as could DreamWeaver MX 2004, and FireWorks MX 2004.
    A CD could be playing in the background, and an FTP client could also be running.

    Sounds like a lot of applications in theory, but realistically virtually all of them would be sitting idle waiting on user responce at any given time.
    Generally it's the foreground application that's really pushing the processor the background apps only rarely are actively working as I'm doing something in another application.

    I'm probably not the target audience for the article though as I already have a pretty good idea of the relative benefits DualCore may bring having used SMP on my home work system before.

    It's nice and can give a bit of benefit in terms of OS responsiveness when multitasking, but I don't really expect to feel any real need fot it until desktop applications start to become multithreaded.
  • Myrandex - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link

    Line Intel tells me I should be doing...Encoding a DVD while playing video games! Umm yea definitely not, when its time to game, other things get to take a hike except for system services and antivirus and system clock icons (which I keep to a minimum anyways). But when it is time for real multitasking...a couple internet browsers at least (IE usually, sometimes w/ some Firefox thrown in the mix), Trillian, Windows Media Player, maybe some bloated Sun Java running on one of those websites, Outlook 2003, Word, sometimes Excel all at the same time. I am excited for dual core to say the least.
  • Anshul - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link

    Downloading huge files (Linux distros e.g.)
    DVD burning
    Web browsing - 12 to 15 Firefox tabs
    Mail (Thunderbird)
    Either Music or Movie playback
    Scientific code running (I'm a researcher)

    Not that I'd dare to do ALL of the above at the same time, but it sometimes gets close.
  • Curt Oien - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link

    SETI
    Zone Alarm
    McAfee Antivirus
    Word
    Firefox with multiple tabs open
    Moving mouse and clicking things.
    Adobe Reader in firefox with multiple tabs downloading large PDF over dail up.

    Now I lock up until PDF downloads complete.
  • jeffosx - Sunday, April 3, 2005 - link

    I did something similar when I got my new G5 DP system. Noticed that the "load' tended to get spread pretty well across the 2 processors so I ran the PS7 benchmark set and then did it again while encoding DV to QT (mpeg4). The PS7 bench when up 20% or so... The encoding didnt take that much longer either but I didnt keep track. This sort of simulates the running of a processor intensive task and some stop start stuff like photoshop...

    There are differences like running 2 non MP aware applications at the same time is much faster than one after the other...

    Cheers

  • Michael2k - Sunday, April 3, 2005 - link

    #43: What, you get the benefit of the doubt (coding on a project while another project is still churning) but we don't?

    #41: Fine, people multitask poorly, but computers are the ones doing the heavy lifting here.

    A couple web pages with flash animations (cpu+ram)
    A download of an ISO (hd)
    Email (hd+cpu)
    Video encoding (hd+cpu)
    Video editing (cpu)

    All that can happen at once, easily. The video encoding happens continuously while the edits happen, for previews as well as renders to disk. Email kicks in every ten minutes, where the email gets processed by spam filters and message rules. The ISO is a continuous stream of network and HD activity. The web pages are intermittent, except for the flash ads that continuously suck CPU, or the javascript that needs to get parsed whenever a site with interaction loads. So even if I'm only doing one thing (assembling a video), several things can happen at once (transitions get rendered, sfx gets rendered, hd loads clips into ram, email gets downloaded, websites get loaded, advertisements are animated, etc)

    As I said before, I'd like to see if there really is a justification in getting a dual CPU; Anand knows what I'm talking about since he's got a dual PowerMac, but the single G5 iMac is cheaper/comes with a nice LCD.
  • nmiceli - Sunday, April 3, 2005 - link

    For software testing i start up to 3 vmware sessions with 98se,2k,xp.

    i think mixing SQL with vmware could be a good multitask challenge
  • nmiceli - Sunday, April 3, 2005 - link

    I usually do:

    some heavy SQL querys from remote and local servers mixed some with msaccess, while working in VC++, unrar some files (more dbs) and sometimes act as a file server, 1 to 3 web pages.

    With SQL using as much as 900mb of ram, i think my main problem is ram.
  • Rajeev - Sunday, April 3, 2005 - link

    My multitasking is all done on Linux, since I have multiple desktops to work with (SO NICE). Of course, it's also a lot faster than Windows. :P You should be able to simulate this on Windows though. And yes, this is a common situation for me:

    Playing a LONG MP3 playlist with XMMS (though PolyPAudio, which mixes but takes more CPU I think)
    Gaim open, talking to a few people
    Firefox open with 8-10 tabs (including your site which is a complete CPU hog with all of the animated GIF and Flash ads)
    The GIMP open with a complex filter running
    Bluefish (a HTML editor, not WYSIWYG) open with 5-15 documents open and syntax highlighting for PHP
    gFTP open uploading a 50MB video to a slow server
    AbiWord or OpenOffice open with a couple documents
    A few terminals (Gnome Terminal) open in the background
    Gnome 2.10 desktop w/ system monitor applet

    So yeah, that's pretty much a standard situation for me. That's not a resource hog at all on Linux though- my old P4 1.6GHz system w/ 512 MB RAM can handle it fine. In Windows though, it falls flat on its ass. (I'm not trying to start a Windows vs. Linux flamewar here, just saying its probably a much more stressful benchmark on Windows.) If I were doing the benchmark on Linux, I would have a kernel or GCC compiling w/ optimizations in an X terminal (not a termal emulator/window, I mean the full-screen beasts you get by pressing CTRL+ALT+F1-6). That would be the perfect benchmark for me. :D
  • OzzFan - Sunday, April 3, 2005 - link

    My typical usage:

    SysTray:
    CachemanXP (mainly used for free RAM display)
    SoundMAX control software
    RealVNC server and listening software
    BOINC (Seti@home)
    Norton Ghost (for auto archiving to my file server)
    WeatherBug
    MusicMatch Jukebox
    WordWeb dictionary
    AIM
    Norton AntiVirus
    AnyDVD
    CloneCD systray
    Ad-Watch monitoring software


    Software running:
    A few instances of Calc
    FireFox with anywere from 1 to 9 tabs running
    Excel
    Outlook Express (currently demo-ing IncrediMail)
    Internet Explorer (for pages that don't render in FF)
    Notepad (I like to write my basic HTML by hand)
    Command Prompt
    Nero Burning ROM (or cloneCD)
    Nero Vision Express (or CloneDVD2)
    AIM software
    Adobe Acrobat Reader 7 (for viewing program documentations online)
    (Sometimes I might be running) Ad-Aware scan
    Windows Media Player * or MM Jukebox * or Nero Showtime
    (Sometimes I might be running) Norton Anti-Virus scan
    A few Windows Explorer windows open for file copying (either over network or to USB pen drive)
    WinRAR or XP's ZIPping function
  • Excrazymac - Sunday, April 3, 2005 - link

    I've run 3dsmax while listening to Winamp and chatting on AIM.

    Other multitasks include converting 20-30 minute video files from one codec (DivX) to another (usually Cinepak) so it plays nice in some of my DVD editing programs.

    I've tried to multitask with Virus Scanning, but it never works. Games run choppy once it starts, it'd be interesting to see if Dual Core can fix that or if HD access time is more of the bottleneck.

    My Two cents.
  • PandaBear - Saturday, April 2, 2005 - link

    Also, forgot to mention that most of the "multi-tasking" people talk about here aren't really that hard core, since most of those task are running in idle most of the time. In that case if lower latency (quicker response) is required, you can always manually change priority in task manager for the process and reduce the time slice for your OS.
  • PandaBear - Saturday, April 2, 2005 - link

    The compiler I use at work is quad threaded, so hyper-thread and dual core definitely help. My experience is that hyper-thread on a 2.8GHz P4 improve speed by about 8%.

    Other than that I run the debugger and a test tool (both poorly written via infinite loop) and manually set one to lower priority than the other, so my response will not be too slow.

    At home I usually burn DVD or defrag in addition to browse web or bit torrent. I think single core is fine for me in this case.
  • rookwood - Saturday, April 2, 2005 - link

    Looking for a new notebook to replace my Dell Inspiron 8500. Probably BOXX or Hypersonic (Clevo D900T unit). P4 660 EM64 & HT; 4GB DDR11 RAM; Dual 60GB 7,200 RPM HDD; NVIDIA Quadro FX Go1400 256MB Graphics & Dual DVD burners. Running Revit, ADT and Photoshop requires OpenGL and P4.

    Stardock
    Outlook
    Autodesk ADT (2D cad)
    Autodesk Revit (3D cad & rendering)
    Adobe Illustrator
    Abobe Photoshop
    Excel
  • brownba - Saturday, April 2, 2005 - link

    #41 is right on.

    i'm laughing at most of these comments -
    i don't believe anyone who says their typical computing experience involves burning dvd's, encoding divx, compiling code, bt with 4 torrents, photoshop'ing... all at the same time - that's just either retarded or a gross exaggeration.

    that being said - i usually have firefox, thunderbird, winamp, mcafee, zonealarm, acrobat, ssh secure shell, vs .net... all open, but the only time i'm truly multitasking is when i might be coding on a project while another project is still churning
  • Brian23 - Saturday, April 2, 2005 - link

    I ALWAYS have the following programs open:

    Outlook express
    FireFox (30+ tabs)
    Windows Explorer
    Winamp

    In adition, I usually have at least 2 or 3 of the following open.

    Microsoft Visual Studio (C++)
    Adobe Acrobat
    Word
    Excel
    Orcad Pspice
    LabView

    Of course I also run other software. It would not be uncommon for me to have a lot of the above software open and then play a 3D game (HL2, Doom3, UT2004) on top of it.

    I generally have 400 to 900MB of memory used at once.
  • Poser - Saturday, April 2, 2005 - link

    I don't multitask, and neither does >90% of everyone else who uses a computer.

    I do frequently task-switch, where I'll go from email, to web, to excel, to photoshop, but I'm not doing multiple things *at the same time*. The only time I ever end up really multi-tasking is when I start something that the computer will take a long time to do and (importantly) doesn't require my intervention for the next minute or so. Those cases are pretty damn rare, and are (for me & 90% of others) things which are hard disk, or CD/DVD speed limited. The number of times when I've waited for more than a minute for the *CPU* to do something can be counted on one hand -- one no-fingered fist if you don't include the times when I ran out of RAM and started thrashing the hard drive.

    If I was running voice to text transcription software while listening to a lecture and simultaneously recording video and taking notes in Word or Powerpoint -- that'd be a good test. It's the sort of thing I'd really love to do, along with thousands of college students, but I'm doubtful that the software & hardware are quite there yet.

    On a mostly unrelated note I think Voice to Text will be 6 different flavors of wonderful if it ever gets reliable. You can Google your text archives, but you can't your audio ones. And you can skim a page way faster than you can listen it.
  • Sahrin - Saturday, April 2, 2005 - link

    My current systray:

    Steam
    AOL IM
    Bulletproof FTP Server
    Google Desktop Search
    Folding@HOME

    AND

    These things in the background while I run the following apps:
    Outlook
    2-6 IE Windows
    ATI TV Player or Windows Media Player 10

    OR

    I play a game (HL2, Homeworld 2, UT2004, Rome: Total War)

    OR

    I watch a video in the form of DVD or .avi file on WMP 10.
  • jonodsparks - Saturday, April 2, 2005 - link

    My wife (the queen of multi-tasking) has actually caused a year old powerbook with 1 gig of ram to generate a low memory warning.

    Typical programs running on the home office:

    Mac:
    IE
    Firefox (5-10 tabs)
    Safari (5-10 tabs)
    Pages
    Word
    Excel
    iTunes
    Flash MX
    Dreamweaver MX
    Photoshop (had 130 seperate images open)
    Imageready
    Maya
    Alias Sketchbook
    Acrobat Pro
    Fetch
    Fireworks MX
    Freehand MX
    Corel Painter
    Mail
    5 Finder windows
    (long live Mac's cache)

    PC Server:
    DHCP
    DNS
    IIS
    IAS
    Application server
    File & Print Server
    SX Spider (renderfarm utility)
    Word
    Excel
    Maya
    Photoshop
    Imageready
    Acrobat
    bit torrent
    dreamweaver mx
    homesite
    flash mx
    freehand mx
    fireworks mx
    firefox
    IE
    outlook
    itunes

    3 PC renderslaves

    SX Spider
    Maya renderclient
    bittorrent
    United Devices
  • Elavanis - Saturday, April 2, 2005 - link

    hmm i multi computer more than anything but I generally have 2-3 firefox windows. Winamp either mp3 or a divx. edonkey for my anime downloads. And when i feel like burning off my anime, both the dvd and cd buring at same time. Usually an excel spread sheet just for a simple calculations or a list program. In the background I have the standard programs, antivirus etc. In addition i have a cancer recearch program (grid.net?) set to idle and a rainbow table generator also set to idle.
  • Neuro - Saturday, April 2, 2005 - link

    Running Azureus with 4 torrents, Winamp playing, ripping a cd and browsing the net.
  • SocrPlyr - Saturday, April 2, 2005 - link

    One of the most noticeable things that I have encountered while working on dual CPU machines is the responsiveness of the computers. My main PC is a 1.8GHz P4, but while working in a lab I really prefered working on the dual 450MHz P3s that were there. This came about because I was running some test code that was going through a reachability algorithm. What was nice about the dual box was, I was still able to work on my code while it was running on the other processor. Just in general, under load the DP was much more responsive. There are serveral ways that this can be tested. One thing that would like to see is a qualitative assessment of the responsiveness of the system under full load. AKA, even if both cores are fully loaded, does having two cores improve the responsiveness? Another thing that could be done is run a small but long process that is single threaded that will take up one of the core's time. Then benchmark the other core as if it was a single processor system. This might help show performance loss from sharing what little the cores do share. I also request that you bench the EE w/ HT on and off, it will help show how much of a possible performance gain is from the higher bandwidth and how much is from the HT. Also if the EE is not at the same clock (or close to the same clock) if you have a engineering sample that the multiplier can be reduced, please do so that we can see the benefits on the dual core that higher bus speeds give.
  • Michael2k - Saturday, April 2, 2005 - link

    Duh, I just realized how to take a benchmark of the system!

    Take a benchmark of your choice.
    Run it on an empty system
    Record the score

    Run it on a loaded system
    Record the score

    Run it on a loaded system with user interaction
    Record the score + make a subjective evaluation

    You can progressively increase the system load and you have your benchmark, from unloaded to fully loaded, while at the same time you have a subjective evaluation!
  • red and black - Saturday, April 2, 2005 - link

    Complicating this is the horrible MSWindows scheduler, which will make the second CPU seem like a tremendous help to responsiveness. That's useful information for people, since so many run MSWindows -- but it would be great to also have info about how much the second CPU helps on systems with better interactive response, as in linux 2.6.
  • Oscar Papel - Saturday, April 2, 2005 - link

    PC: Visual Studio - programming (autocomplete on in a b/g thread)
    Mac: XCode - programming (autocomplete on in a b/g thread)
    2 or 3 browsers open.
    1 or 2 downloads in progress.
    IM client

    PC Only:
    indexing software running in the background
    A/V, Antispam also RITB

    Mac Only:
    1 or 2 Terminal windows doing something
  • Live - Saturday, April 2, 2005 - link

    Antivirus auto protect
    Antispyware auto protect
    Software Firewall
    Firefox with multiple tabs
    Filesharing BT and/or Emule
    MP3 player
    IM software
    Word
    Notepad

    The above is what I normally use. Then I guess any normal app you would test like games etc would put some stress to at least the current systems. With dual core and better network controller I am hoping the above will not be noticed in the future. But hope hasn’t gotten me very far yet :}
  • Anonymous - Saturday, April 2, 2005 - link

    I don't think I've ever actually posted here before, but might as well. =)
    If you're looking for 'average-Joe' typical-but-highend user type stuff, I think there's plenty on any modern machine that should push it...

    A few torrents on a decent connection, and a dvd or (even moreso) digital tv tuner playing in the background, while you're either browsing or working even a bit, and you'll get a little slowdown on any machine, new or old, P4 or athlon.

    So... Perhaps you could do a test where you see how much it takes before things start to get slightly slower, rather than measuring the speed of these encodings and compiles and things?

    Even if it was just a very subjective quick segment, I'd certainly like to see one, and think it's probably where the nicest bonus is with dual machines now, and presumably dual-core.

    (If what I'm talking about makes any sense, I'm not sure I explained it so well, sorry... I mean like when you ctrl-alt-del and it takes that little extra second to give you a window, those sorts of little things, if that helps)
  • Excelsior - Saturday, April 2, 2005 - link

    Basically, this is how I multitask.

    Many firefox windows/tabs or IE windows open.
    GAIM running with 3 or more windows/tabs.
    Foobar playing MP3s
    Burning a CD.
    Downloading with Bittorrent (seems to slow my system down noticeably)

    I hope dual cores are a success, because I will be first in line to buy one (assuming the low-end one isn't crazy expensive)
  • Athlex - Saturday, April 2, 2005 - link

    Under windows 2000: Winamp, Folding @ Home (TeamAnandtech!), Many Firefox windows (no tabs for me), Trillian, ABC (bittorrent; resource pig), MBM, proxy client, couple shell windows, couple putty sessions, Nero 6

    I'm running an Opteron 144 @ 1.9GHz. It'll be cool to see what speeds the dual core Opterons launch at. The rumor mill seems to suggest either at the low end of the speed spectrum or at the high end, but little in between. Can't wait to find out how dual core stacks up with HT or dual-core with HT!
  • bersl2 - Saturday, April 2, 2005 - link

    The most stringent test of multitasking ability I might realistically present:

    Folding@Home
    Firefox (add some CPU time if displaying Flash or Java)
    OpenOffice
    MPlayer
    a large compile
    the usual complement of supporting programs (precisely: XTerms and attached shells, xconsole, gkrellm, fluxbox, the X server (actually significant), daemons, the kernel)

    Alternatively, I leave on Folding but close most other things if I'm going to play UT2k4. Too lazy to shut that off.

    I guess you could add the slight overhead incurred by sshd or iptables every time some bot takes a few potshots at root :)

    For reference, this is on a 2GHz Williamette.
  • Fayer - Saturday, April 2, 2005 - link

    BT
    Emule
    Windows Media Player(HD-wmv playback)
    Network Firewall&Anti-Virus Monitor
    MSN messenger
    Photoshop
    Firefox with 10+ tabs
  • Matt Smith - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    I also wouldn't mind seeing something like an "emerge kde" benchmark under gentoo. But I'm sure other websites will do this.
  • Matt Smith - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    Firefox, Thunderbird, WMP (playing .wma's), Norton (just auto-protect), maybe a couple of Office apps
    and
    A divx encode, large compilation (.NET?), and WinRar encode

    Probably just 2 of those last 3 at a time.
  • jesse - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    I often have either Photoshop and After Effects open, or Photoshop and Maya- and this is while I have firefox, thunderbird, and iTunes running.
  • Rich - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    Burning DVD's and zipping up large Outlook PST files . Any database sql statements using aggregation will churn.
  • maharajah - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    The only time I really multitask at home is when I'm doing MPEG 2/4 encoding with some photoshop work.
    Normally I need to run the encode at low priority, so that Photoshop and the GUI can be responsive.
    It would be interesting to see the MPEG 2/4 encode running at normal and/or high priority on the dual core with Photoshop running at normal priority. Is the OS smart enough to handle these threads, or must the user assign a process to a processor/core ?
  • Pete - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    Any update on the status of the the 550 / MCE article(s)?

    Thanks!
  • Dmitheon - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    Why not run the Database load tests you all did in the Dual CPU Database Server Comparison? While not applicable to alot of the home users stuff, it'd be a good way to show how applications designed to take advantage of multi-cpu set ups will benefit. For practical purposes for this audience, a file sharing app on a closed network that is downloading 1 stream, uploading 3 streams, a FlaskMPRG encoder converting a ripped DVD to DivX and running the Half Life 2 AT_c17_12 demo. Run the demo 4 times, by itself, with file share, with encodings, and then with both.
  • RickR - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    DSCALER would be the ultimate test of a multi-proc system. Whenever I'm watching TV on my PC with DSCALER, everything else slows to a crawl.
  • Anonymous - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    Another good ideea would be batch converting about 5000 jpegs to png using irfanview .. yet I'm not sure if that has something to do with threads

    I'm also remote desktop software (real vnc, radmin)...
  • mariush - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    in my case ..

    I'm almost always using Visual Basic 6, a VS .NET compiling something large would be a good testing ideea.
    Usually two or more total commander windows.
    Winamp playing an online radio
    Two or three Mozilla Firefox Windows with about 8-12 tabs in each one (I'm not exagerating, I always forget to close them and prefer to close about 10 at once).
    VirtualDub converting a 25 GB video capture ( lossles Huffyuv compression), applying deinterlace, null transform (to cut black borders), resize using Lanczos3 filter, save in lossles format again (a lot of stress on drives)
    Bitcomet downloading about 10-12 torrents at a time (a lot of work with the cache and TCP/UDP connections, probably lots of threads open)
    I also have an Apache 1.3.33 server installed and MySql on the computer, about 200 people visiting it every day, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger,F-Secure Antivirus..
    Hope it helps...
  • Aquila76 - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    I'd like to see the tests done real world with standard tasks (AntiVirus, Anti-Spy, Firewall, PCProbe(or equiv.), etc.) running in the background like everyone has while doing the 'stress' testing.

    My usual load is Outlook, FireFox (8 Tabs), Thunderbird (yeah I use both, w/diff. accounts), WMP10, Paint Shop Pro, and Trillian.

    My 'Stress' load would be the above (minus Paint Shop) but running Divx encoding (DVD movie to 1GB avi) while gaming (HL2, D3, NFS:U2, or Joint Ops online @ 1600x1200 2xAA & 2xAF).
  • Kevin - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    As a student I often have programs such as SolidEdge CAD software, Maple 9.5 math software while running Word, Excel and Firefox at the same time. Maple seems to bog down my CPU often so I wouldn't mind seeing some form of performance analysis on that. Oh and of course everyone always has some sort of music going at the same time!
  • Turnip - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    I often browse the web while installing stuff.

    With the amount of compression and registry accesses installers do these days, it actually feels like it must be a surprisingly gruelling task must be happening "under the bonnet" sometimes.

    When setting up a new PC or something, I'll often end up setting off a couple of programs to install at the same time.

    -Nip
  • GhandiInstinct - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    Play WoW in 2 instances, I open 2 games play on 2 different accounts at the same time.
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    Adian,

    I'd love to take a look at it. Fire it over.

    Take care,
    Anand
  • Chris - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    My dream of having great multitasking will come when I can be transcoding video while working on a 120mb photoshop file while listening to iTunes with absolutely no idea there is instensive CPU tasks going.
  • Adrian - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    at work I usually have outlook open, excel, and word, I have windows media player 10 playing in the taskbar, at least 3 or 4 browser windows open, an RSS reader, and then at least 3 or 4 word specific programs open in addition to anti virus all the security stuff

    At home, it's mostly browser windows, I do a lot of podcasting, so I'll have cooledit and ACID open, along with feed-demon and the usual NAV and other misc system utils running in tray. I usually have skype, and at least yahoo IM and MSN IM logged in. I use LAME and Windows Media Encoder, and Ogg Vorbis encoder a lot too... itunes is installed but not always running.

    A while back, I wrote a utility called Threader that was a multithreaded CPU benchmark... you're more than welcome to try it out or look at it... let me know and I'll send it over... In light of all the multicore stuff going on, I've decided to give it a refresh and increase the workload it creates.
  • ChrisH - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    Things always running on my work computer:

    - Winamp
    - Outlook
    - Firefox, with mutiple tabs
    - PVCS (Version Control software)
    - 2-3 editors (code, development windows)
    - Work tracking system
    - Some messaging software
    - Google Desktop Search/Deskbar

    Standard windows applications, and lots of code windows (Progress 4GL).
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    Thanks for the input guys, keep em coming!

    GT - I can guarantee you'll see at least half of that by July :)

    Take care,
    Anand
  • CheesePoofs - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    ^^^ That was me BTW ... forgot to enter my name.
  • Anonymous - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    I often run Spybot, Ad-Aware, defragment, listen to music, have Outlook open, and 8 Firefox tabs open. And in the background I have seti@home running, plus AntiVir guard and Trillian (my IM client).
  • poco153 - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    Firefox with 5-12 tabs open
    iTunes playing
    Trillian
    Thunderbird
    Backgound programs: Windowblinds, M$ antispyware,Speedfan, FAST defrag2, gmail notifier, mouseware, ATi stuff, Mcafee security, Gigabyte VGA utilities, nVIdia sound controls

    Sometimes I have Fireworks MX, Dreamweaver MX and photoshop open, and the occational Word or Excel document.

    This is all using the Explorer shell.
  • Michael2k - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    How about 'casual' multitasking? This is Mac specific, but you can 'translate' it to PC:

    iTunes open and playing from a playlist
    iPod plugged in and synching from iTunes
    Mail open
    iChat open and three chat windows open
    Safari open and 10 tabs open; AnandTech, Slashdot, ArsTechnica, Yahoo News Yahoo email, a couple articles from Slashdot open, a couple articles from AnandTech open, and the Ars Forum open
    Terminal open
    Four Finder windows open
    Email being typed into while people send you IMs

    If you want to up the complexity:
    Rip a CD while doing the above in iTunes
    Download a Linux ISO as well
    Compile Mozilla
    Run Mozilla

    This was 'normal' on my single CPU 400MHz system three years ago. I want to see how dual CPU systems deal with this (as a justification for buying a dual CPU!)

    Benchmarks... I don't know how to measure this. Time page loads? Time compiles of Mozilla (not bad idea)? Time launch times? Time how long ripping a CD takes? Count the number of beachballs, and how long?
  • Brandon - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    Right now, the processor I am using is a Pentium 4 3.2GHz with HyperThreading. I've heard all the flak from those who say it was a huge waste of money and that I should have purchased an Athlon 64 because they're faster and cheaper. I eventually made a leap and purchased a 3000+ (s754) on the nForce3 platform, but I wasn't impressed by it's performance with my usage. Sure they can perform faster (generally) in situations where there is only one application running. I can even admit for sake of arguement that when there are many CPU intensive applications running, the Athlon 64 will complete the tasks faster than a P4.

    But what I've noticed when I am comparing both platforms in my usage situations is that when there are CPU intensive applications running, that the Athlon 64 platform will have a much higher response time when using Windows (like clicking on the Start button, switching between applications, etc) than the P4 platform, which does those basic tasks almost instantly. Sure the Athlon 64 may complete the intensive tasks faster, but in terms of productivity, the P4 will allow ME to do work simultaneously which means more efficiency overall. I'd rather be able to work the whole time on the computer versus sitting and waiting every few moments I try and do something. I don't know how this would be able to be measured, as a lot of the real-world benchmarks I see don't focus on this end of things (they concentrate more on which CPU can perform all the tasks faster).

    With dual core CPU's coming out, I really think that in multitasking, Windows (and application) response time would definately improve. Maybe you could have a few CPU intensive apps running and measure the time it takes to switch between applications, or for the Start menu to come up...or opening a new application?
  • GTaudiophile - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    What sort?

    Well, when I play games, that's pretty much all that runs, aside from the standard Windows, Norton services, etc.

    It's when I get into web development that I really start to multi-task: Adobe PhotoShop CS, Macromedia Studio MX 2004 apps, Notepad, uploading photos from camera, uploading pictures to server, favorite mp3 player running for music...

    Anand: Any chance you can have a "Dual-Core AMD64 / ATi R520 SLI" review up by July?

  • red and black - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    Compiling a program, playing music, and loading web pages in a couple browser tabs.

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