Actinic Processor Usage

[grantglendinnin]

Thanks for confirming some points there Zoltan.

So it looks like an Actinic-v9-proof system should have:

Fast CPU with good cache level and high FSB
Lots of memory, in my experience, at least 2gb
Fast hard disk speeds with high read/write speeds (read reviews, not all 300mbps sata disks run at the specified speed), fast spindle speed, seek time and a good sized buffer.

For me it's the imports/exports that take a very long time - I suppose Zoltan's answer has answered why it is near impossible to do a snapshot to a usb flash drive.

If and when I get some free time, I might actually consider putting one of our spare backup drives which is actually very quick into a machine and seeing how it improves the import/export. At the moment a backup is taking upwards of half an hour. I'd hate to think what this would be with an IDE drive

[Duncan Rounding]

Agreed. Dual and Quad core CPUs are unlikely to help apart from perhaps helping doing some other task whilst Actinic is busy - posting to the forum springs to mind.

I was running a 3Ghz single CPU and now have a dual core 2x3Ghz both with 4Gb RAM (max'd ar 3.2Gb inder XP) and see no performance increase at all on the dual core machine.

Snapshots don't bother me too much but large hierarchical imports can take an age - especially if there are errors.

[zmagyar]

Fast hard disk speeds with high read/write speeds

I did some testing with different hardware some time back to check VS build performance. Not exactly the same as Actinic but there are similarities. The most important finding I got was interestingly the HDD. Neither the memory size nor the CPU speed affected the performance as strongly as the HDD cache size.

[malbro]

I did some testing with different hardware some time back to check VS build performance. Not exactly the same as Actinic but there are similarities. The most important finding I got was interestingly the HDD. Neither the memory size nor the CPU speed affected the performance as strongly as the HDD cache size.

Given the speeds of processor and memory it is not surprising that hard drive access and seek times will be the main problem. Having too little RAM results in the hard drive being used for cache by the operating system and that really slows windows to a crawl.

So to speed up Actinic we all need hard drives with high spin speeds to get access times down, large cache to reduce drive access and defrag the actinic folder to keep the files all in one place.

[fergusw]

and defrag the actinic folder to keep the files all in one place.

With the volume of read/write IO operations involved with importing and exporting snapshots it would be interesting to note if there were any plans afoot to optimise fragmentation/file system architecture with this part of the software.
Vista, for example, tries background defragmenting of the file system, recognising frequently accessed file system structures and focusing on optimising those. I recall some Microsoft boffins mentioning somewhere that Vista should self-optimise to a degree and not require the defragging we all got used to performing on a regular basis......

Actinic is built by VS2005

Interesting to note. From a programmers point of view I'd be interested to know if it has been design with N-Tier architecture and therefore possibly then applicable to different database architectures? e.g. mySQL, Oracle etc hence the ability move to SQL for Enterprise?
Also I'd be keen to know if there were any API type of plans in the pipeline where some Class/Method functionality was exposed to developers to integrate plugins into the Actinic core API.

[zmagyar]

it would be interesting to note if there were any plans afoot to optimise fragmentation/file system architecture with this part of the software.

There are no plans for that. On that route we would end up writing our own OS for Actinic quickly. :-)

Interesting to note. From a programmers point of view I'd be interested to know if it has been design with N-Tier architecture and therefore possibly then applicable to different database architectures? e.g. mySQL, Oracle etc hence the ability move to SQL for Enterprise?

The code base is quite old and designed with old approaches. This is slowly moving forward to a more modularised design. But there are still much room for improvement on that field.
Actually Enterprise version of Actinic supports MS SQL databases.

Also I'd be keen to know if there were any API type of plans in the pipeline where some Class/Method functionality was exposed to developers to integrate plugins into the Actinic core API.

There are plans for that all the time. But the time is tight and it's always voted off to give time to features with more demand.

[pinbrook]

Zoltan, have you any tips/comments re obtainig ultimate performance for the scripts on the webserver.

ie the value of using dual/quad processors for software not written for dual proc. use of memory, use of HDD cache etc

[zmagyar]

It's hard to tell for the servers. Basically Actinic scripts doesn't have any special hardware requirement. Anything required for a good server will do for Actinic. But on the software side it's quite important to have the binary modules (MD5, ActEncrypt, etc) installed for decent performance.