Author Topic: Sluggish performance  (Read 2350 times)

Lurvas

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Sluggish performance
« on: April 14, 2006, 04:20:16 PM »
Yup I read the entire forum before posting this...

My computer:
IBM Thinkpad a couple of years old...
Intel Celeron 1 Ghz
640 MB memory
35 Gb harddrive, 28.5 Gb free space
Windows XP SP2

I used the machine for TD when I had 128 MB memory installed, it ran but was slow when changing screens and busting players. Installed another 512MB and it ran just fine.

Now I'm running TD 2.0 and itīs running slooooow. Pressing X to bust a player I'll wait a few seconds before the screen appears and a few more for the names to appear and a few more after choosing a player and so on.
On the main screen the various clocks and timer will change every 3-10 seconds.

Locking the main screen (ctrl-l) will make the clock run smoother updating every 1-2 seconds. Changing screens (F1, F2, F4...) is faster but still quite slow. Even busting players is faster.

I'm hoping for a couple of good ideas for making TD 2.0 run better.

At the rate I'm losing money at poker, a new laptop isn't really an option...  ;)
Guess my computer is kinda low spec.

/thanks
Lurvas

Corey Cooper

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Re: Sluggish performance
« Reply #1 on: April 17, 2006, 10:13:32 AM »
I think your computer is probably fine.  Might be a *little* sluggish feeling, with a 1GHz Celeron, but it shouldn't be so slow that the clock doesn't update properly.

640MB seems like plenty of memory, too.  My development PC only has 512.  However, what we've seen with a few users is that memory can really be key.  *Having* 640MB in your PC makes no difference if there's little *free* memory.

Bring up the Task Manager and see how much memory is available.  Press Ctrl+Alt+Del, or right-click on the taskbar and select Task Manager, to open the Windows Task Manager.  Select the Performance tab.  On the bottom of the dialog, see what these amounts are (when the TD is running):

Available, under "Physical Memory (K)"
Total, under "Commit Charge (K)"

You can copy/paste these amounts, although you might need to pause the display to do so, since it will keep updating.  To pause it, on the View tab, select Update Speed -> Paused.

Lurvas

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Re: Sluggish performance
« Reply #2 on: April 19, 2006, 04:23:01 PM »
I think I found the correct values (I'm using Swedish windows), but I have no idea what I should do about the information   ;D .


                             TD running/TD not running
Physical memory (K)    460 852 / 497 208
Commit Charge (K)      132 440/   96 132

The performance is actually better with the Task Manager running on top of TD 2.0. Timer is updating every 1-2 seconds, with the Task manager closed I'm back at updating every 3-10 seconds (Mostly around 4 second intervals).
I'm not madly in love with my computer at the moment.  :-\

Corey Cooper

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Re: Sluggish performance
« Reply #3 on: April 19, 2006, 05:22:18 PM »
Hmm, I'm not sure what to make of those numbers, either.

First, your "Physical Memory" should never change, no matter what is running, since this represents how much memory your computer contains (not how much is in use).
Your "Commit Charge" is a little low, although not unreasonably.  Looks like you've got Windows XP pared down to running in under 100MB of memory.  I don't think I've seen mine under about 130, with just about everything except essential system processes stopped.

So, unfortunately, this doesn't help much.  If the software runs faster with the Task Manager over it, it would seem to indicate that updating the display is consuming a lot of processing power.  This is not too surprising.  But it also sounds like the various other tournament processessing code is consuming a lot of the CPU as well.

I have never run the software on a Celeron, and it's been a long time since I really understood much about the difference in performance of the various processor types.  It might be that a 1GHz *Celeron* just isn't beefy enough.  I really don't know what speed of a non-Celeron processor a Celeron processor could be compared to.