With dual core CPUs coming out in the next few months, we're starting to develop our own real world multitasking tests to see if dual core CPUs will really improve performance in those scenarios. So I'm asking you all, let me know what sort of multitasking you all do and we'll do our best to get some of it included in future articles. Either post in the comments or drop me an email.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
68 Comments
View All Comments
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 threadsI'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 stuffAt 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).