[colore]

hello

what is the current bottleneck in todays home systems performance? why you wait for example so much for firefox to start?

I think software architecture and not hardware issue

thanks

PS: this is not a post about fixing a specific problem, but to discuss about the possible source of bottleneck in everyday pc use

[CoffeeFiend]

colore, on 02 October 2011 - 10:40 AM, said:

what is the current bottleneck in todays home systems performance?

It totally depends on which particular task. There isn't one single thing to blame for all slowdowns and delays. It could be the CPU (like encoding), it could be the GPU (like games), it could be disk performance (like many business apps), it could be network I/O (like downloading something), etc. And usually it's a combination of more than one factor (e.g. when gaming, your CPU could become the bottleneck if your GPU isn't, or the disk I/O when loading levels, or network latency when playing online, etc). Sometimes it's the amount of RAM available that's the bottleneck. Sometimes it's the L2/L3 cache on your CPU. Sometimes more cores, or hyperthreading or new instruction sets help. And yes, sometimes software is poorly written and that never helps.

TL;DR: everything.

[MagicAndre1981]

RAM, HDD and CPU are the Bottleneck. Which Windows do you use? With Superfetch in Vista and Windows 7 Firefox starts in 1 second on my PC.

[Andromeda43]

On just about every system, it's truly a combination of factors, most of which have already been mentioned.

But high on my own list is all the SAFE Defaults that MS built into Windows, so it will run on a system with a slow HD and very little ram.
XP for instance, will actually boot up and run, with only 128 meg of ram, but not very well.

For years I've tried to identify and eliminate as many SAFE Defaults as possible.
A good for-Instance, is the 30 second boot delay, and the number of CPU's set to a default of "1" even if you have two or more.

I won't go through my entire list, but it's significant. I can just about double the speed of any PC from the way it runs, right out of the box.

Thirty years ago, I re-wrote the OS for the Commodore 64, because it had so many safe defaults in it. I could load a game in 20 sec's
that had previously taken six minutes.

I hate SAFE Defaults, especially when the authors of the OS give you no choices to easily disable them.
I've committed most of my performance tweaks to batch files and registry scripts, for ease of application.

Bottlenecks? Windows is full of them.

[engmod]

The slowest item in a windows pc is the HDD.

[IcemanND]

engmod, on 02 October 2011 - 08:39 PM, said:

The slowest item in a windows pc is the HDD.

Agreed, take a machine and replace the spinning platter HDD with a SSD and performance issues almost disappear. I did this to a Thinkpad t61 (4 years old), ran windows 7 ok, put an SSD in it and it runs as well as a machine new out of the box.

[cluberti]

Given almost every component other than the disk has improved immensely since the late 70s/early 80s, and hard disk technology has not, in general the easiest bottleneck to find and remove is the hard disk (replace it with an SSD and watch the CPU become the bottleneck ).

[Andromeda43]

Not meaning to be argumentative, but........
IDE drives ran at a max speed of 133. SATA I ran along at 1500, while SATA II doubled that, to 3000 and SATA III doubled that again to 6GBM.
I have one of the new SATA III hard drives, but my motherboard can only drive it at SATA II speed.
I've tried two different SATA III controller cards, (PCIe) but neither of them seem to want to work with Windows XP. Go figure.

One safe default MS stuck us with was that they left the Kernel (a critical part of the OS) on the Old-Slow hard drive, because initially all PC's had very little RAM.
Now with most PC's running multiple gig's of ram, the Kernel can be loaded into FAST RAM on bootup, greatly improving system performance.
I do this with a Registry Hack for myself and all my customers. It does make a difference. Think of a Ferrari compared to a horse and wagon.

Another big hit is taken by all the dozens of Services, loaded and running on the average PC, that no-one will ever need. Another Default.
So gain a little more performance by disabling every Service you don't need. A complete list of services for each OS is available on the
"Black Viper" website with recommendations as to what can be disabled and what can't.
I just put all the services that can safely be Disabled, into a batch file, so I can shut them down in about three seconds.

Then there's those leaches that jump into your Startup folder, every time you load a new program, like Adobe Reader, Java, Real Player, or whatever.
So make sure there's nothing in your Startup folder that you don't absolutely HAVE to have running all the time. Deselect everything else.

I could go on and on, but then I don't want to give away ALL my little Speed Secrets.

Cheers Mates!

This post has been edited by Andromeda43: 09 October 2011 - 07:08 PM

[IcemanND]

While startup items may be slowing a system down, replacing that spinning disk with a solid state drive will do more than turning everything off. The SSDs in my machines kick the read/write speeds of every spinning disk I have ever compared them to in both desktops and laptops. Only thing I can think of that might come close would be a raid array.

[puntoMX]

Andromeda43, on 09 October 2011 - 07:06 PM, said:

Not meaning to be argumentative, but........
IDE drives ran at a max speed of 133. SATA I ran along at 1500, while SATA II doubled that, to 3000 and SATA III doubled that again to 6GBM.
I have one of the new SATA III hard drives, but my motherboard can only drive it at SATA II speed.

UDMA/133 Ultra DMA 6 133MB/s 
UDMA/167 Ultra DMA 7 167MB/s 
SATA revision 1.0    150MB/s
SATA revision 2.0    300MB/s
SATA revision 3.0    600MB/s

IcemanND, on 09 October 2011 - 08:15 PM, said:

While startup items may be slowing a system down, replacing that spinning disk with a solid state drive will do more than turning everything off. The SSDs in my machines kick the read/write speeds of every spinning disk I have ever compared them to in both desktops and laptops. Only thing I can think of that might come close would be a raid array.

Don't forget access/seek times (0.1ms) and IOPS, read and write speeds is nice but not everything.

[dencorso]

UDMA/167 Ultra DMA 7 167MB/s

All the others I know about, and have used or use, except for SATA 3.0, which is too new for my hardware (although I've just bought a 2TB WD Caviar Black which *is* SATA 3.0, which I had to jumper down to SATA 2.0, for the time being). But UDMA/167 I always thought were a cyberspace myth... have you ever actually seen or used hardware capable of it? I don't mean HDDs, I mean controllers or mobos.

[cluberti]

Had a few Adaptec cards way back when that had actual UDMA/166 ports on them.

[Andromeda43]

The new SSD's may be faster at data access, but they still have to move it to the CPU via the hard drive interface chips, which become another bottleneck.

Enough! this argument is going nowhere.

Happy Holidays Everyone!

[IcemanND]

Get a current gen SSD and put it in your machine, then decide where your bottle neck is. I've put SSDs in everything from 4 year old laptops, to 1 week old desktops and every single machine has seen major performance improvements.

Take for instance the semi worthless Windows system rating. every machine I have upgraded the hard drive in the lowest score was the hard drive. After replacing the hard drive with a SSD the lowest score ends up being the graphics card. The hard drive rating jumps from a 4-5.x to a 7.5+ for every machine.

As an example on the same machine Word normally takes 10 seconds to fully open, same image on an SSD Word opens in under 2 seconds.