Performance tips

osxrules · April 23, 2018, 12:49am

Hopefully this’ll be one post I don’t get flamed for.

It’s boring and will probably die out in a couple of days but then that’s what happens to boring threads. %|

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone had any performance tips to share on any software they might have used. I know that there are a few people who have older hardware on Elysiun so I figured this might help.

One thing I recently discovered when using mplayer is that some of my video wouldn’t play properly. It was all jittery and unwatchable. Then I discovered that mplayer post-processing is set at 3/6 by default. So if you use mplayer and found some clips you couldn’t play, try using the -pp 0 setting when launching it to turn off post-processing. This is more effective than using the buffer for slow media.

Another thing I recently discovered from the Blender docs is that the mesh undo steps can take up a lot of memory. The default setting on Blender is 32 so if you do high-res poly modelling with not much Ram and say you have a model between 50-100,000 polys, you could be using up about 100MB Ram on the undo alone. I personally prefer to put it up to 64 undo steps but I prefer low poly stuff anyway. Still, by setting it down to 5 steps or so, you would save about 80-90MB Ram. I think most of the time I only use 1 undo step anyway.

One thing I’d like to know is if there is any way of speeding up Windows Media 9 video playback or converting it on the Mac. WMP9 is appalling at playing even very low bitrate video. Other things I would like to run faster are GIMP (under X11) and MS Word.

Finally, is there a way to get web browsers to not use so much memory? Firefox uses over 300MB virtual memory (more than Maya). Is this because they have the entire cache in Ram or something?

Enzoblue · April 23, 2018, 2:55pm

Couple here, I use WinAmp instead of WMPlayer, it uses 14mb’s of memory on my system, even when playing movies. It’s free and very open, you can d/l addons to play any file. I can even leave it playing music while I play Doom3 and not notice.

Also, my Firefox uses 47mb’s in my WinXP system. That’s not as much as your’s, but still 3x more than anything else I have running so it must be a hog.

valarking · April 23, 2018, 2:55pm

YOU SUCK JOO FAGG0T AND SO DOES YOUR LAME NOOB MAC LOL!!!1

z3r0_d · April 23, 2018, 2:55pm

windows media player seems sorta dependent on what in the 3d graphics card world seems like fill rate

if your window is smaller things go a lot faster

this ought to apply to the mac too, where I’d imagine hardware accerleration isn’t being used much if at all
[it applies to the windows system I discovered this on because the graphics card is, shal we say, inadequate for everything I want to do]

also, the usual, running at 16 bit color instead of 24 often helps
[of course, there is the quality loss, and on reaonable graphics cards there isn’t a big enough difference to justify it. my geforce 2 ran fine at 32 bit color, those intel cards can’t handle 24 bit color in 3d at all]

more ram helps

fast swap helps

fast hd helps [particularly in windows, a surprizing number of things access the hard drive even with plenty of ram]

having installed clean from dics [instead of from a disk image like emachines likes to do] helps very much
[again, particularly in windows]

uhh

also, not having crap installed really helps. if possible avoid installing drivers for anything but your video and sound card [they don’t usally have crap bundled with them which runs constantly, like printer and wireless card drivers]

virus scanners can cause applications to start much slower than they should
[so can a firewall, but that would have to be a poorly coded application or one too obsessed on security [some apps tell a server when they start and quit for licensing reasons, so you can only run so many copies at once]]

having executables larger than a few megabytes can cause them to take a while to start [or show up in windows they should show up in], at least in windows

having icons on your desktop will slow things down some in windows
[they are redrawn completely more often than they should be]

Alltaken · April 23, 2018, 2:55pm

YOU SUCK JOO FAGG0T AND SO DOES YOUR LAME NOOB MAC LOL!!!1[/quote]

isn’t being a fag, and having a Mac the “in thing” these days. its such a compliment infact.

man you need to get back your pazzaz when flaming valarking. anything involving theeths mum is always a good start

Alltaken

valarking · April 23, 2018, 2:55pm

DAMIT ALTAKKEN YUO HAD TO RUIN MY FLAM!!!111 OMG WHAT A DUM NOOB LOL!!!
GO TO HEL YUO NOOB BEFORE THE ADMIN BANS YOO! GO!

I FEEL ALIENATED IN LIFE AND THE ONLY WAY I CAN EXPRESS MYSELF IS TO ONLINE REPRESENTATION OF REAL PEOPLE THROUGH A DIFFERENT PERSONALITY. ALSO, THE ONLY WAY THEY’LL NOTICE ME IS IF I TYPE IN ALL CAPS. SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME. PLEASE PM ME WITH ADVICE, PLEASE.

sundialsvc4 · April 23, 2018, 2:55pm

Gentlebeings, puh-leeze! … you’re not nearly as funny nor as clever as you think. %|

As far as performance goes, the single biggest factor to address is by-now also the cheapest: More Memory! While you cannot avoid delays spent loading information into RAM the first time, plentiful supplies of RAM will greatly increase effective speed from that point forward.

A surprising second element is disk-drive speed. The usual disk-drives and disk-drive channels that are normally put on-board in a typical CPU are doggy-dog slow. They are capable of only one I/O operation at a time and usually tie up the channel until the operation is entirely finished… seeks, transfer and all. If you instead install SCSI and use those devices, you’ll find a rather dramatic improvement in speed.

Having more than one device, on an I/O subsystem that is really designed for parallel device operation, can also speed things up. When you are on a single spindle, pretty much everything in the system is constrained by seek-time. (The amount of time the poor, beleaguered read/write head takes to move, or ‘seek,’ from one cylinder to another.)

osxrules · April 23, 2018, 2:55pm

YOU SUCK JOO FAGG0T AND SO DOES YOUR LAME NOOB MAC LOL!!!1[/quote]

isn’t being a fag, and having a Mac the “in thing” these days. its such a compliment infact.

man you need to get back your pazzaz when flaming valarking. anything involving theeths mum is always a good start

Alltaken :P[/quote]

Yeah valarking, that was a bit lame ;). BTW, what’s a noob mac? I agree with Alltaken, macs, ipods, xserves, everything Apple is the in thing and I’m proud. Even Gwyneth Paltrow named her daughter Apple! Ok, I know she’s a dumb cow . . You just wait though, in a few years when Microsoft fall flat before the ever growing popularity of unix-based systems, people will be going micro-what? what-soft? bill-who? Microsoft will die and goodness will spread across the land.

alienated?? Can’t think why, there’s nothing wrong with your posts LOL. AAAWWW, never mind here’s a big hug . AAAAAAGH! I am a fag . Oh, wait a minute I just saw a pic of theeth’s mum and got turned on

This is her right? http://www.arabinow.com/ladynow/picture_new/theeth4.jpg
Or her? http://www.metica.se/pics/reviews/theeth.jpg

I found these on Google images - perhaps one is his alter ego, since his mum’s probably not called theeth.

Hmmm, I tried that already. I think you’re right, it could be a hardware acceleration thing. It probably uses directx when it’s on Windows and I doubt Microsoft bothered to implement any different hardware drivers like Quartz or SDL, which is what mplayer does. It would be fine if the mplayer developers eventually get round to supporting WMV9. Does anyone know if you can play WMV9 on Linux etc.?

I don’t have any virus stuff - Mac user . I did have Norton stuff once but it crapped out my system so I stopped using it and I haven’t had any probs.

I think the rest would probably help i.e. more ram, faster hd etc. i think I only have a 5400 rpm with it being a laptop. WMP just seems slow even when playing low bitrate stuff. I mean, I can play divx and xvid stuff no problem in other players, it just seems that WMP9 for mac has been designed/compiled badly.

There aren’t any options in it either for quality settings or whatever. I think there’s a bit of a thing going on between Apple and Microsoft in that they put deliberate bugs in each others’ players. In one read me I LFAO, it said there was a certain text field in Quicktime that gives you some information about the movie and Windows users have to read it backwards because the text was round the wrong way. I mean how hard would it have been to turn it round? Still, I think Quicktime works ok on Windows in general doesn’t it?

Yeah, not funny at all
. Oh I dunno, I just let it go.

I definitely do need more ram though, sundial. I’ve only got 384MB and my apps take between 1-2GB of virtual memory in total. The hard drive is slow too. I didn’t know that the usual drives were slower. Why do they use ATA (I think it is) instead of scsi? I think ATA is limited to 2 drives too isn’t it?

It’s difficult deciding how much you upgrade an old machine before you’re just better off with a new one.

theeth · April 23, 2018, 2:55pm

ROFL! I never tried search google image for theeth. Standard google gives link to my stuff though. Well, that and dentists who can’t spell properly.

Martin

valarking · April 23, 2018, 2:55pm

Lol, osxrules, before you go on, I was kidding. Just makin sure you know.

osxrules · April 23, 2018, 2:55pm

Yeah, I know ;).

valarking · April 23, 2018, 2:55pm

Yeah, I know ;).[/quote]

OMFG SETTLE DOWN. It was just a joke, SETTLE DOWN.