Jim Dean![]() Sage ![]() ![]() Posts: 3022 Joined: 9/21/2006 Location: L'ville, GA ![]() | I cannot speak for Ryan ... my view of the problem discussed in that thread is that possbily internal ARRAY bounds were hit (which Ryan would not likely be aware of), but I'm pretty confident that in the situation specified, the HARD DRIVE was the major issue ... But ... the DEMONSTRABLE FACT is that the OS can and will spread the work that OT (and that many other programs) is doing over multiple processors. I'm at my dual-core laptop now ... an older XP machine ... even IT can do it. The attachments show that both processor cores are engaged during a routine Strategy run-update. Same thing happens during downloads. Same thing happens on my quad-core Xenon box. I'm trying to help you with this ... there has been MUCH MUCH discussion in the past few years about these topics, elsewhere in the forums. The tech support folks do their best to answer these questions, but by and large they are not programmers. The staff programmers that DO know about this stuff are not active on the forum, except "in translation" through the tech support staff. So, sometimes things get expressed incorrectly ... like the "telephone game". AGAIN ... the MOST EFFECTIVE way to find out what config is best is to TEST IT. I'm 99.999999% sure that ZERO Nirvana programmer hours have gone into optimization for specific processors. Maybe some research time has gone into multi-thread (re)coding alternatives ... that issue has been PRESSED hard in the forums over the past few years. But it would be just plain foolish to devote time to optimizing for a particular processor. And Nirvana folks are NOT fools! (I first started programming in 1967, btw ... fwiw ... and I have seen a lot of foolish activity during the past 4+ decades ... Nirvana is refreshingly free of that, imho ... not "pure mountain-fresh", but definitely potable.) I'm 100% certain that the extra power of multicore machines IS used for OT calc's ... the snapshot proves that. Disclaimer ... you can set your bios and possibly the OS to NOT permit a given program to have its processing spread over multiple cores ... or, at least you USED to be able to make those settings ... and I know that HyperThreading had this effect (but you could turn it off in the bios). [Edited by Jim Dean on 8/23/2010 7:36 AM] ![]() |