Optimizing an Intel Dual Core E6300 1.8Ghz Machine
19 Mar 2007 15:12:51 UTC
Topic 192536
(moderation:
What can I do to crunch more work units faster? Right now I average about 300-400 credits a day running both cores, to me that sounds a bit too little as my old AMD Athlon 2500+ machine can do about half of that in a day. Especially since I am using both cores I would expect my times to be much faster and more work done.
I am running XP pro, with 2GB RAM.
Any suggestions?
Thanks.
Jeff
Optimizing an Intel Dual Core E6300 1.8Ghz Machine
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Take a look at your CPU efficiency metric for the host. If it's at 99% plus, then there isn't much more you can do except run it more hours per day (assuming you aren't 24/7 already) or overclock it.
If it's less than 90 % or so, then you need to figure out what's grabbing time away from BOINC. One thing to consider is if you use the machine to do a lot of "paying" or other work, that could have a major impact as well.
HTH,
Alinator
Hi, what do you mean by
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Hi, what do you mean by "paying"?
I leave my Boinc going 24/7 at 100% must of the time even if I am doing other work during the day time, the dual cores are really very good.
LOL..... Making your
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LOL.....
Making your living on it. ;-)
If you do computationally intensive work, then BOINC will be getting a lot less CPU time during that period.
Alinator
LOL, no. Mostly I use mail
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LOL, no. Mostly I use mail and a broswer and that's about it, lots of multitasking and lots of browser windows open in Opera.
OK, your per result figures
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OK, your per result figures look about the same as my Core Duo T2400, which is what I would expect since the differences between Core and Core 2 aren't all that big.
FWIW, mine is running at a roughly 90-10 split between SAH and EAH currently. When I was running at 50-50 I was pulling a RAC of around 300 or so for EAH on it, so you can use that a a baseline for comparison, based on any resource split you have for yours.
Alinator
RE: Right now I average
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If so, why is your RAC for that machine only showing as 83.71?? On closer inspection, you only have one result listed as "in progress" (ie showing in green on the website) so you can't possibly have both cores running EAH simultaneously. You haven't mentioned it but surely you must have other projects in addition to EAH?? Is your quoted figure of 300-400 credits per day the sum total for all projects you are running? If you want people to give suggestions for improving performance you really should try to give as much information about your setup as possible.
Your results list shows that an EAH result takes approximately 3 hours per core. If you were running EAH exclusively you should be able to do close to 16 results per day and your RAC would be around 800-850, ie more than double the figure you quote. Some other projects may give you substantially less credit per hour and this could account for why you are only seeing 300-400 per day. This may well be the major reason why you think your machine may be underperforming.
One way to check the performance of your machine is to look in the top computers list on the website for machines with similar specs to your own. This host has the same CPU as yours and with a RAC of almost 1100 is performing rather better than yours. This may well be due to overclocking so you should continue scanning down the list for others as well that may not be overclocked. Overclocking is probably the easiest way to improve the output of any machine but is not something to be undertaken without proper knowledge and preparation.
Cheers,
Gary.
Wow, I must have clicked on
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Wow, I must have clicked on the wrong host when I was looking at this earlier.
That's a lot better than my T2400 can do, even if I overclocked it! ;-)
Alinator
My apologizes, indeed I am
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My apologizes, indeed I am running other projects, you can visit my Boinc stats page - here Not sure if this will help you or not, just remember when you look at the numbers that I am running two PC's, my dual core and the Athlon 2500+, I know there is a way you can find out what each chip is doing. There was one day I think where I got 800 because I run the climate project, but even if that were to report everyday I would be sitting around the 300-400 mark.
Originally when I posted I thought this was going in the Boinc forums, but then found out it did not, but figured I already posted, why delete it... Anyway any feedback you can give me would be greatly apprecaited.
Looking over all the data
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Looking over all the data available now I'd have to say you've got something else chewing up time on your system.
Based on your BoincStats data I came to the conclusion you were only doing roughly 1/2 to 2/3 the output you should be, taking into account there isn't 100% credit parity between the projects as Gary mentioned.
Also using Mr Gergel's E6300 as a baseline and assuming it's doing 100% EAH 24/7 and not overclocked, your hosts per result performance is consistantly about 25% slower. Unless there is some other difference in hardware not apparent here, I would expect this to be far less.
So as I asked earlier, what are you showing for the performance metrics at the bottom of the host summary page?
If those look good (IE at or around 99% or better as they should be for a 24/7 host), then the next step might be to do a test run on EAH alone (or any other project of your choice) and see how you compare to others then.
Alinator
Oh BTW, you are spreading his horsepower all around, good for you! ;-)
You might also want to take a
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You might also want to take a look at what speed your processor is running at by looking at the General tab in the System control panel applet. I noticed a few days ago that my AMD Turion X2 had been clocking down to 800 MHz when checking on why my laptop started slowing down processing workunits due to the erroneous conclusion that I wanted to preserve battery.