Computer Speed & How We Observe It
 

The earlier post about home computers and security got me thinking about how do we figure our computer speed has dropped off or we need to get a newer and faster one?
This does not include folks who just have to get the newest or fastest or ?????. Here's an example:
Back in the early 1990s I was staff information systems officer at COMNAVAIRPAC at NAS North Island. One part (big part) was getting a Lan installed for the whole staff figuring about 700 computers total. The tech contractors I has were with SAIC and several were ex service computer or electronics folks with great knowledge. Their plan I got had several parts: first upgrade ALL desktop computers to the new 386 32 bit machines from the older Zenith 286 tan boxes. Second was to expand the LAN to everyone, a department at a time using fiber optics. Third was to start an hourly training class daily at lunch time to cover these new Windows based machines and all they could do.

A couple of the first to get a new PC and to be connected were the two older ladies who were the watchers of what all the civilians did to make sure we followed federal rules and regulations. They had a bunch or big, dusty, hard to read federal rules and at times would take them hours to find an answer! So, I gave them two new 386 machines both also having an external CD-ROM reader since they had just started getting CFR manuals on CD-ROMs. After a couple days of training, they were really happy of how nice and fast this was now!

Well about 6 or 7 weeks later I got a call from one saying her looking for a certain rule was super slow so several of us went upstairs and after investigating found they both had solitaire, shopping websites, emails open and had eaten up all the memory as remember a megabyte or two was all that could be used. So, some additional training enlightened them on how to keep just one or two apps active so they could also do real work if needed. Darn....reading manuals from CD-ROM just got faster!!!!

This happens more that I realized as later in 2010 I was the Oracle DBA for an aircraft maintenance software company and got sent to Connecticut as the company users of the software were complaining about slowness, lost connections and even the "blue screen of death" and our support fellow couldn't help them. First computer I looked at, the manager had 12 apps running and his hard drive was going nuts trying to manage swapping in and out what he was trying to do. After some instructions and hands-on showing of how to manage his apps....darn if things didn't speed right up! So I enjoyed some lobster and a snow storm before I came back to sunny CA.

If anyone has observed something like this besides me, let us know and this happens even today with me and my 24 core Intel CPU.
John Rogers the oldracer

Certainly for me. Back in about 1985 I started with computer graphis with a brand new IBM AT, the early version, 6 MHz not the faster 8 MHz that came later. It had a separate video card that ran a color monitor. That was to display the graphics I built. It had a whopping 2 MB of RAM and a huge 32 MB hard drive!

A year later we got a scanner, and I did my first scan. An 8x10 that needed to be rotated 90 degree to make it horizontal. I started the rotation in Aldus PhotoStyler, one of the programs that Adobe bought and incorporated a lot of the code into Photoshop.

Anyway I started the rotation about 2:00 PM and went home at 5:00 and when I came in the next morning it was at 95% complete. Just one tiny 8x10 tiff file!

I have built a ton of computers over the years. My current computer is 3 or 4 years old, but I have 256 Gig of RAM, two different M.2 SSD 2 TB drives and a 14 TB RAID 5 with two high end video cards for the mapping work we do. The parts alone were more expensive than my 1974 914 2.0 that I ordered and bought new in 1974.

I just finished a customer project that is a 32GB tiff file. We can compress it to a mapping format file called JPG2000 to "only" 3.5 GB and upload in in minutes to our One Drive FTP. The client downloads it, and I email the invoice. One clients download a file on our One Drive in about that big in just two minutes! He has a fiber connection, and fast speeds.

Just today, I did something I had not done in years, I burned a CD! Trying to fix a MBR issue with one of the many other computers we have.

I've walked my wife through some simple optimization stuff over the years.

These days, it's mostly "don't have a ton of stuff on your desktop" (which is apparently bad for MacOS), don't have a million tabs open in your browser, and periodically reboot.

That last one is probably the main thing. Closing the screen on the laptop and then opening it back up later is a "sleep/wake" thing, not a reboot, and eventually memory leaks or clutter take over and a reboot is required.

My first IT job was tech support for Bell Atlantic dial up home Internet (emails ending in "bellatlantic.net" not emails that ended "banet.net"). From then on, I've been a network guy, not a PC guy so haven't had to deal with regular end users much (thank goodness).

Over the years I have had "but the error says that it may be a network problem" when it was anything but. I have also got a lot of "I think the firewall is blocking my traffic" when that wasn't remotely the problem.

I got my first "PC" in 1988 running DOS, eventually 3.2 or 3.4, I think. I did a lot of work on the config.sys and autoexec.bat to ensure that my machine worked as smoothly as possible with it's 640k RAM. I've been optimizing my machines (regedit, disabling unnecessary TSR apps, etc...) since those early days.

Not sure if you know it but you can set an application such as one that works with large data files weather JPEGs or Tiffs or PDFs or ??? that can use 1 or all of the cores in any CPU and how it works with RAM and such. Start Windows Task Manager, then select "Details" and scroll to the software you are running that needs power. Then right click and select "Set Priority" and select "high" or "Real Time", click "change priority". Then click "change affinity" and select how many CPUs you want then click the OK button.

Not a good idea to have more than 1 application to be set as fastest but cascade them.
If one of the apps is downloading from the internet it does not need a lot of CPU power so knock it down a bit. You can also use a built in virtual machine and run a program in that virtual machine to isolate it from the real world. This was done a year or two by a computer guy who ran a copy of Windows in a virtual machine setup to look like it was his only one and he let it get hit with a "ransom"! Well he traced back to the bad guys and wiped them out!!!!!
John Rogers the oldracer

I just saw this thread in passing ... don't wanna hijack it ;)...

I've built one desktop in my life ... dedicated for audio stuff... Windows based, everything was SCSI, a digital soundcard for DAC, etc. it was a beast. I could have used the first Pentium from many years earlier, and it would have still screamed ;).

All computers are a combination of processor speeds, memory access (DMA, etc.), amount of memory, fragmented (mebbe?), I/O to devices, and then network stuff, etc. if applicable, and if ya want to improve performance, one must improve "the one" which is the actual bottleneck for performance.

I can tune-a-fish with the best of the best ... and love fishing threads ;)

I only fished for REALLY big fish tho' ... except that one desktop years ago.

I just threw that audio processing bea$t in the electronics dumper bin.

If you want real performance .... don't use Windows as the OS ... a bloated pig will not win many races ... not against real competition on the fast tracks... ymmv.

-A Soapbox racer :D

One more thing .... multi-core, multi-processors, etc. ... which is better?

1 @ xxxx speed
2 @ xxx speed
10 @ xxx speed

It always depends .... on $10 million big blue boxes... or even toys for end users to surf with ;)

Now we can talk about how folks don't really "get" network "speeds" either...
that all depends too :D

Queueing Theory 101...

Storage speed has a lot to do with overall speed as well.

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I certainly remember the days of shuffling my 5.25 inch floppies in and out of a drive, and wishing for a hard drive. This one was 3 grand with the installation kit, and that is 9 grand in 2025 dollars. Way more than I paid for my brand new 74 914 2.0. Now drives are huge and cheap. I did pay over 600 bucks for my dial up modem!

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1763732137.jpg
Nov. 20, in 1985, Windows 1.0 – the first version of Microsoft's Windows system – was launched. It looked like this:

I also remember the 640K memory limit and booting up my programs and having a whopping 300KB of ram left. :rolleyes:

I build/support the networks for the folks that perform algorithmic trading (low latency trading). So they are ALL about speed. They do not use M$ Win. It's all about FPGAs these days (for max speed), although there are slower/cheaper solutions for folks that don't want to pay for max speed.

LOL ... Glen joins the PC geezer club ....

I didn't touch a PC until Windows 95 (Pentium 133) and that Audio beast was Win98 ... at home ... you guys rock :)... and are cool as hell ;)...

I had the fastest mainframes (except Crays) at my fingertips since I was a teen and for 3 more decades tho... and high-end servers ;).

The M6800 micro-processor communnications device I was learning microcode on at IBM in '84 was around $200K back then too .....

We all have different backgrounds ... and are geeks :D

Steve is a baby geek :)

You all rock!

I still have my Microsoft mouse, with patent pending.

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http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1763753737.JPG
It came with my copy of Windows 386.

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I still have my 5.25 inch floppy for Compuserve I used on my Commodore 64. I actually bought a pair of Levis on Compuserve. 300 baud, no graphics at all, just text, and it came down so slow I could read it as it filled the screen. Compuserve charged by the minute of connection time. It was insane expensive at that slow of a speed. I killed it after one month.

It still astonishes me to have a "gigabyte" internet speed, and a computer with 256 gig of RAM, and 18 TB of total storage, with two high end video cards in it, and I have had it for about three years.

I first dialed in at 4800 baud ... with a terminal the size of a bowling ball bag .... fast enough... to a bank.

I blazed the information dirt road via the Nike sneakernet .... walked that box of 370 Assembler cards to the window and it got sent to the Research Triangle Park and sent back ... the VERY next day :D.

Then "they" paid me to drive 'em .... :)

LOL ... gigabyte ... gigabit ... what does it matter :D?

One of the big issues with Windows has been how it tracks what updates are applied.

Apparently it tracks all updates from install to current, as opposed to last updated state.

This means that as a system ages, it gets slower. Wipe the drive and do a fresh install and suddenly the same hardware is faster w/ the same software and OS, etc.

Linux is the way...

Wasn't he that dude in the Peanuts cartoon ;)?

Tho I was never a Unix OS guy ... I was an "end user" ...

Unix was indeed the OS used when performance mattered.

Whether on servers or even on mainframes... my TCP stacks and other stuff ran under Unix (or a partition) .... under the primary MVS OS.

Windows, security, and great performance ... hmmm.

Mutually exclusive ... or just a pigly OS that pretends to be a contender?

Winblows ;)

Or one of the BSDs

Another Steve geek joins in :)...

I was an MVS Communications OS guy for years ... left Unix to experts like you ... but used a flavor of Unix (OMVS) on the BIGliest Blues for TCP stacks, OSPF, etc.

All high-end servers DNS, DHCP, VOIP, VPN, Firewalls, etc. were under Unix. I knew them all imtimately ... just not as Unix guru .... like you :).

FGPAs you made me look it up ;)

Sorta like the eproms we burned in the IBM labs in '84 ... along with microcode etc. and a processor on each interface ... I had a blast ;)

We didn't have any windows in our VERY secure labs either :D

My first computer was a Commodore 64 that my dad got me in 82. I was 10. I loved it. I remember getting a “copy disc” that was used to bootleg games from your friends. Getting games for free was so exciting. The games were so slow to load but it felt so much better than the Atari 2600. I still have the Atari and all my games. The kids today have no idea how good they have it.

We also had Compuserve with a modem but there was nothing for a kid to do with it.

Then in 1990 in college I had a class where the professor had fallen off his roof and lost his hearing and most of his sight so he conducted the entire course online via the school’s intranet and email. This was a big deal and the start of computers being a daily part of my life outside of gaming.

In 1991 I discovered phish.net and for the first time experienced using a computer for something of interest to me, other than games, that wasn’t a school project or school work. Way ahead of their time that band….being able to read concert reviews, setlists, and print guitar tablature was very exciting but slow. Everything was so slow. You would have to go make a pot of tea while the page was loading.

LOL ... Gotta go ...

If you need a CD of a S. Kimock show recorded on DAT at the Wetlands and then mastered to CD within a few daze ... the four day run was epic ... we had fun ;).

I like to Phish too .... Trey & Steve ... hoot!