If anyone out there is looking for a way to noticeably shorten the time it takes to complete a model and you are using either Windows Vista or Window 7 you might want to try turning off the transparency effect in the Aero Glass. I know the transparent boarders and task bar are the main eye candy in the OS, but, it is a terrible resource hog.

Several days ago I turned off transparency on my laptop (Windows 7 64bit, 2.2 GHz Core2Duo processor, 4 GB of RAM) that was running an Hadsm3 and a Hadam3p WU. Normally on this machine an Hadam3p takes slightly more than 120 hours (sometimes as high as 128 hours) to complete.

Today I just finished of the Hadam3p’s in only 104 hours. That’s the quickest ever for an Hadam3p. THAT’S A SPEEDUP OF OVER 16 HOURS! THAT’S MORE THAN 13% QUICKER!!! The Aero Glass effect is nice, but, the performance hit is very high. I intend to leave it off.

To turn off Aero Glass just type “Aero Glass: in the search box, click on “enable or disable transparent glass”. Once on the Aero Glass page just uncheck the “enable transparency” box and then click “save changes”. That’s all there is to it.

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Sorry, but there must be another explanation.

I am running a HP Laptop with Win7-64 bit Ultimate and 2 HADSM3 Tasks-

Last trickle said 17,598 secs and real time was 17,943 secs. This is an overhead of 1.92%.
Even if I could switch off everything else, my gain would be just 2%.

ChrisD

Could You please give me a WU# from before and after? I would really like to see what this is..

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It used to be (and probably still is) that integrated graphics would slow down cpdn applications. This would occur whether the graphics were being displayed or not. No doubt this had something to do with the graphic chip using system memory for its video memory. Memory performance on such systems was always worse than memory performance on the same system with a separate graphics adapter. Since cpdn performance is quite dependent on memory performance, anything that hampers that hampers cpdn performance. If Aero is somehow hammering the memory more that the integrated graphics adapter uses, it may affect overall memory performance more, and therefore cpdn performance. It wouldn\'t show up in a CPU time vs. real time comparison. If the system or laptop had a discrete graphics chip with its own video memory, then that wouldn\'t be much of an issue.