Question

High speed encoding - memory - disk - speed issues

Asked by: jobrienct

I have an application that Im writing that captures video and then converts it, twice. The capture is real-time, the first convert is 3x real-time. The second convert is actually not occurring on the system Im testing right now because it's intel specific and Im testing a dual cpu dual core opteron, so basically I fake that part of the process by just copying the source file to the target files location.

When I run this app on "lesser" systems it seems to run without issue. By lesser I mean dual-core PentiumD 830 (300Mhz). When I run it on a dual xeon 3.4Ghz I have "some" issues. When I run it on the dual cpu dual core opteron, which blows the xeon away in terms of performance, I get alot more undefined errors trying to create the output file.

Im going to throw a 150G raptor and another 2G of memory at it as a first attempt to resolve the issue. The real solution may lie in being able to "see" what the work flow is like as it flows throguh the memory and disk subsystems. What I would love to hear about is a way to monitor the subsystems so I can see where potential bottlenecks are occurring. Like what my streams are doing as they are generated by the application in memory and stream to the 250G Sata2 output drive, or the sata2 Raptor when it gets here tomorrow.

Beyond that I'd love to hear anyones ideas on how best to prevent bottlenecks in bleeding edge systems. Im currently using pc3200 CL3 DDR ECC Reg 400 Mhz memory on an tyan K8N-DL board. Im running XP64 and seeing 4 execution cores that are all running at about 90% during the encoding process.

I have no proof that the problem is realted to speed, just the evidence of running the same app on a range of platforms.

regards,

John

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Asked On
2006-03-15 at 19:52:53ID21775831
Tags

speed

,

issues

,

memory

Topic

Miscellaneous Hardware

Participating Experts
1
Points
500
Comments
3

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Answers

 

by: CarlosMMartinsPosted on 2006-03-16 at 07:59:35ID: 16206255

FileMon from sysinternals will allow you to see realtime exactly what your file system is doing.
http://www.sysinternals.com/FileAndDiskUtilities.html

And you can also get very useful info on their enhanced Process explorer.
http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.html

 

by: jobrienctPosted on 2006-04-06 at 21:39:23ID: 16397890

The filemon utility is useful, although it doesn't identify the bottleneck i think i should see, it does show me everything thats happening under the hood. Thank you. I will award the points to you.

Im a little disappointed that I can't get a discussion of the issues on EE anymore - A 500 point question used to be enough  to get a good conversation going here, but no longer. I guess I should quit paying the monthly fee and go back to answering questions if it's this easy to pick up 500pts these days <g>

 

by: CarlosMMartinsPosted on 2006-04-07 at 02:14:50ID: 16398839

I don't know if it's possible to change the "points" at this moment. You can ask a moderator if it's possible.
And you can also post a "pointer question", redirecting it here - people usually just look for the "new" posts... and if it's posted on a day with many posts, it kind of easy to "miss" a question.

My guess is that you have some sort of "racing" condition in your system, and that it is only noticeable when running at a specific frequency (on those high performance system). I can't think of any easy way to debug it.

Regarding bottlenecks... there's not much to say.
You have the memory, the hard disk subsystem, and the graphic/video card (if applicable).
For the memory, there's not much you can do, getting the fastest, low latency memory you can get.
For the hard disks... on my "built for speed" system, I have 2 raid 0 arrays (4x80gb + 2x120) that's as fast as I can go on a desktop machine.
Of course, the ideal would be to have the system on raid 1 array, use a raid 0 only for the "high performance" stuff, and then "back it" up to a raid 5 array as soon as possible.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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