Resource Management in XP

[mirrorlake]

I am doing my thesis project and there is large amount of computing work to do. The statistical software I am using is R (based on C++). I am working on a Dell 4550 (P4 2.4G 512MB RAM). Some of the computation would take 4 to 8 hours. I wonder how XP manages its resource while such computing work is on background. Is there anyway I can do to speed up it a little bit (like asking XP to invest more resource) ? Many thanks.

 

[Joemonkey]

well, if you aren't going to be doing ANYTHING else on the computer, you could always get into task manager (ctrl+alt+delete), go to the process, right click on it and set priority to realtime

if you want to do anything else on the PC set it to High (it will still take forever to do anything else as long as that process is set higher than normal)

 

[warcrow]

There really isnt anything you can do, I mean. What else is running on your system?

I would just close down everything in the system tray, then open task manager and kill the unwanted processes, but even with that, the benifits will be minimal.

Remember, even moving your mouse uses cpu cycles (although be it very very slight), so just turn the monitor off and walk away.

 

[Nothinman]

well, if you aren't going to be doing ANYTHING else on the computer, you could always get into task manager (ctrl+alt+delete), go to the process, right click on it and set priority to realtime

This will basically prevent anything else from running, when you say realtime to NT it listens 100%. Changing the priority won't help much anyway if nothing else is running that R process is going to get 100% of the CPU anyway.

I wonder how XP manages its resource while such computing work is on background

What resources? Is the process CPU bound? Memory bound? Disk I/O bound? How you would alleviate each of those is different.

 

[warcrow]

Exactly, nothingman.

Its just sounds like what he's doing is just going to be number crunching. From what he's stated, I would assume its CPU bound strickly.

 

[mirrorlake]

Thanks a lot guys. Well, I am pretty sure it would be CPU and memory bound. Yeah what I am doing is pure mathematical computation. When I am running the program, sometimes I will have other things running too, like winamp or bittorrent. I know it would slow things down but its gonna be overnight work anyway. I was wondering that if there is any program which could reserve CPU usage/memory for certain process. Any idea?

 

[BFG10K]

Just close down all system tray applications and background applications and that should do the trick. There's no need to play with the priority.