How do you multitask?

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• 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