PI Processing Power

[Shelster1973]

After my marathon image integration the other night, realsie that PI is a lover of processing power.

This has now got me thinking is it worth upgrading my current setup?

Am not going to be looking for a whole new rig, just thinking of upgrading the processor to see a gain.

At present I have an i5 2500K fitted and whith not looking to want to change anything other than the CPU was thinking of going for an i7 2600K.

Do you think I would see much of an increase?

Smally comparison is here

[Xplode]

The small increas in performance is not worth it.  Note that it's an old cpu so price is higher than for newer models which are faster.

[Shelster1973]

Yeah had thought that, but was after a samity check really.

Have thought of newer CPU upgrade, but need a way to only change CPU and motherboard as am more than happy with my graphics cards and the 32 GB of RAM I have in there.

Plus it is watercooled so have to factor that change in too....new CPU will need a new waterblock.

[Xplode]

4790K + new motherboard? You should be able to reuse ram and waterblock

[IanL]

Have you taken a look at the swap file settings? (Edit -> Global Preferences - > Directories and Network.  Remember to hit the circular blue "Apply Global" button on the dialog after making any changes.)

Look at the tool-tip on the Swap storage directories for advice.  There are also a few threads on the PI forums about swap and performance.  Perhaps counter-intuitively, it might be worth using some of your 32GB of memory as a RAM disk for swap rather than as normal application memory.

[Shelster1973]

Have you taken a look at the swap file settings? (Edit -> Global Preferences - > Directories and Network.  Remember to hit the circular blue "Apply Global" button on the dialog after making any changes.)

Look at the tool-tip on the Swap storage directories for advice.  There are also a few threads on the PI forums about swap and performance.  Perhaps counter-intuitively, it might be worth using some of your 32GB of memory as a RAM disk for swap rather than as normal application memory.

Did notice the swap file stuff while I was sat teiddling my thumbs waiting, but have yet to get ona nd make any changes to see if it makes a difference.

Have a free night on thursday, so can have a long old play then

[Xplode]

You should run a Pixinsight Benchmark

Here's my results with 4790K @ 4.5 Ghz, 16gb ramdisk

[Shelster1973]

Do have the AMD RAMDisk somewhere...may have to donwload again, but have purchased it for full use, so will look at setting up a 16 GB RAM Disk and using 2 of the 3 SSDs I have for swap files.....every little will help I suppose

[silios]

I am not that sure the cpu you are proposing would be a minor upgrade considering it has twice the threads to work with 8 instead of 4.

maybe someone with that processor can chime in and run the PI benchmark as well.

edit: on second thought the benefits would not be mind blowing in any case more like 20% speed up i guess.

[Xplode]

It can run 8 threads, but it's still only 4 core so usually there is just a small change in performance.

2500k seems to get around 4800 cpu points, 2600k seems to get around 5000-5200 cpu points, both at standard frequency.

Upgrading to a newer cpu/mb will give a better performance gain for your money.

[Shelster1973]

I am not that sure the cpu you are proposing would be a minor upgrade considering it has twice the threads to work with 8 instead of 4.

maybe someone with that processor can chime in and run the PI benchmark as well.

edit: on second thought the benefits would not be mind blowing in any case more like 20% speed up i guess.

20% is better than nowt

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[silios]

20% is better than nowt

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True that,

but Xplode is right : the ROI of getting a new mb/cpu is superior to the 20% increase

(all that cpu talking got me into thinking i need to upgrade, darn computers... )

[Shelster1973]

Here be my current benchmark before I have done any tweaking or twiddling

[Shelster1973]

Now with 2 8gb partitions on SSD's and a 16 gb RAM disk set up in global options as swap file options.

Feel there may be a fair bit more tweaking to do on this one, but is a step in the right direction

[Xplode]

There is no need for the SSD partitions, just add the ramdisk 4x and you get good swap speed.

Your cpu score seems low? At least 500-700 points lower than the lowers numbers i found for your cpu.

[Shelster1973]

Ah OK. ...will bin the ssds from the list and just have ram disk. Not sure why cpu score is low.......

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[Shelster1973]

Removed SSD's and running RAM disk only now

Have to now check that my overclock and RAM adjustment are still active.

Updated my BIOS a few weeks back and think that it may not be all it should be now.

[Shelster1973]

Final tweak....for now.

OC'd to 4.23 GHZ and have RAM running at 1950 MHZ or there abouts.

Getting there.

think I can take the RAM a bit higher on a clock as is supposed to be clockable up to 2133 MHz.....

[Xplode]

20% + boost on cpu and around 450% on swap!

That's a nice boost and it cost £0

[Phillyo]

Wow. I need to look into this swap thing! I only have 16gb of RAM but it should be ok right?

Phil

[Xplode]

Wow. I need to look into this swap thing! I only have 16gb of RAM but it should be ok right?

Phil

You should be fine. 

I would recommend 6-8gb ramdisk with 16gb ram.

You can set your regular temp files to go on your ramdisk too and then they get cleaned every time you restart

[ChrisLX200]

You may find that the increase in benchmark score does not translate to an apparent increase in performance, because swapping to disk influences the benchmark greatly yet many (most) operations of PI don't use it. It's CPU brute force that rules really.

ChrisH

[Phillyo]

Well I've given it a try so we'll see if I notice any real difference. The score has certainly changed. Swap file from 1100 to about 15000.

Worth a shot if nothing else

[Xplode]

You may find that the increase in benchmark score does not translate to an apparent increase in performance, because swapping to disk influences the benchmark greatly yet many (most) operations of PI don't use it. It's CPU brute force that rules really.

ChrisH

You are correct!

I did a test now, the test was BatchPreprocessing with stacking, 30 lights, 21 flats and 1 master bias, all 20mpix files.

Results are 17m 15s with the ramdisk, 20 sec slower with 2 SSD's in Raid 0 and 6-7 min slower with a 5400rpm laptop disk connected with USB3.

For the SSD and HDD tests i used the disks for both storage of the files and for swap.

[RobRob]

It would be nice if PI would fire more threads in parallel during its processing. Now all steps are done in sequential order (especially to processes with a apply to all button or when executing  BartchPreProcessing)...