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I'm running 64 bit windows 7. I have the i7 processor.
I am using NOTEPAD++ to do a full text search through a whole directory of a few thousand text files.
For some reason when I look at my machine's performance, it shows that I'm hardly utilizing any CPU:
How do I force a program to utilize more CPU so that it's faster? The search is taking a long time.
Would this information suggest that it might be IO bound?
l--''''''---------''''''''''''
Posted 2013-07-03T17:03:06.257
Reputation: 713
4What makes you think the program isn't already using as much CPU as it can? (hint: programs are limited to more than just your processor's clock speed; in this case, disk activity/latency would be a good metric to consider). – Breakthrough – 2013-07-03T17:05:36.623
@Breakthrough gotcha! thank you. so you are saying an SSD drive might speed this up like crazy right? – l--''''''---------'''''''''''' – 2013-07-03T17:08:34.453
1If the process is I/O-bound rather than CPU-bound an SSD would help. – Karan – 2013-07-03T17:09:44.250
@Karan would you say that this process is more IO bound? – l--''''''---------'''''''''''' – 2013-07-03T17:10:03.773
1Certainly seems that way. You can confirm using something like Resource Monitor. – Karan – 2013-07-03T17:11:17.943
@Karan i just added a pic of the Disk activity. would you suggest its probably IO bound? – l--''''''---------'''''''''''' – 2013-07-03T17:13:03.757
You can select notepad++.exe in the list and see the amount of reads it's making. Simply searching through a large number of text files would certainly not tax a CPU like yours. – Karan – 2013-07-03T17:21:36.207
Are you running any "memory optimizers" or anything like that? Your system has way more free RAM than it should and it's likely that's why I/O is so slow. – David Schwartz – 2013-07-03T18:40:33.017
@DavidSchwartz wow! i dont know anything about hardware, but i didnt know ram could slow down IO. btw why do you make an assumption about how much ram i need? im actually running a hadoop cluster on my machine, so that will take up all my ram :) – l--''''''---------'''''''''''' – 2013-07-03T19:03:03.170
It's not about how much RAM you need, it's about whether the system is using the RAM you have or not. For some reason, your system is not using the RAM you have -- notice almost 26GB free. RAM you aren't using is not more useful than RAM you don't have -- neither makes your I/O any faster. (So-called "memory optimizers" make I/O slow by forcing your system to waste lots of memory.) – David Schwartz – 2013-07-03T19:14:24.120
im not running many programs. – l--''''''---------'''''''''''' – 2013-07-03T19:24:33.607
Right. So what? You can still use RAM to improve your performance by avoid disk I/O. For some reason, your system isn't doing that. The question is ... why? – David Schwartz – 2013-07-03T19:41:02.320
OOOH i see. but how does it know in advance what to suck up into memory? – l--''''''---------'''''''''''' – 2013-07-03T19:45:04.503
let us continue this discussion in chat
– David Schwartz – 2013-07-03T20:02:09.783