A really long post offered only FWIW and with the disclaimer that YMMV so do plenty of homework before attempting these for yourself! In fact, because of the costs AND risks involved, I almost did not bother posting it, but in the end I figure it may be useful information for some and you are all smart enough to decide if these will be good tips for you to explore further. So without further babble,
“A few tips I’ve gleaned on tweaking my Mac Pro’s performance“
To set the stage, I have a newer machine that is pretty high end, the Mac Pro 8-core 3.2 machine. Next let me clarify I am not any kind of computer guru or technical expert – these are just some tips I came across that made a notable difference in the performance of an already fast machine. Finally, I want to extend a special thanks to two folks who answered many of my questions offline and kept me pointed in the right direction, Bob Fruend and Lloyd Chambers. (Lloyd has an excellent website with lots of reviews and tech tips at: http://www.diglloyd.com/ .)
The first tip is regarding ram. My machine came with 2x1G ram and I immediately added 4x2G sticks for a total of 10G ram. This left 2 ram slots open for another pair should I want to increase ram in the future. Then I found a ram test that made reference to having all the ram bays full improving performance overall and was curious how significant it really would be. Here is the link: http://www.barefeats.com/harper3.html. It appears that 1) you want all ram bays full, but 2) additionally the top slot pairs should match the lower slot pairs. So it appears you get better ram throughput if you have all 8 bays full of 1G sticks than you will with 4 bays full of 2G sticks, though both are 8G ram total. It also appears that having 4x1G in every slot or 8G total is actually better throughput than my 10G configuration was. So I decided to order 2 more 1G sticks to fill up out the slots, but when I got online I discovered the 2G sticks were actually less expensive per gig than the 1G sticks, so I decided what the heck and ordered four more 2G sticks. (For those curious, Apple ram is expensive, so all my ram has come from OWC.) Okay, so now I have 16G of ram in my machine…
My first test was simply booting CS3. With the old ram configuration, CS3 booted on my machine in just over 4 seconds, which is admittedly pretty darn fast to begin with, so I did not expect any huge gain. But I was in for a surprise… With the new configuration, I was stunned when CS3 booted in under 2 seconds! Now I realize it could be the larger total of ram, or it could be all bays full, but it seems to me that 10G was already overkill for a program launch, so I am putting my money on the having all bays full scenario actually making a difference. (Important note: CS3 boot times are greatly affected by individual preference settings, file and plug-in load arrangements, so do not panic if you have longer boot times than I do with your CS3 configuration on a similar machine. I have optimized my CS3 to only load plug-ins and file formats I regularly use.) At any rate I give this a cautionary recommendation as other congiurations may not see any performance difference, but if you are looking at a ram upgrade, I think this is something to consider; it certainly worked for my set up.
~~~
The next tip is more involved, drive striping. Striping is basically a RAID 0 one two or more drives and increases performance by dividing the writing times across two or more drives for increased data throughput, yet maintains the total storage capacity of both drives. While striping can increase performance without loss of total capacity, it needs to be pointed out that it cuts reliability in half for a 2-drive stripe and more for higher multi-drive stripes. So ANY data stored on a striped array really needs to be redundantly backed up via a mirror (RAID 1) to properly insure against a total data loss. (And let me point out there are MANY different RAID strategies, so it pays to educate yourself on RAID configurations before choosing my relatively simple option below, since your needs may be better served by alternate strategies.)
First note that for optimal performance your OS swap file, CS scratch partition and image read/save drive should all be on separate physical drives for best performance. This is so those operations don’t end up competing for I/O time on the same disk when called up. In other words, it is not a good thing to work on large images stored on say your desktop if your OS swap file is located on that same physical drive, even if it is in another partition; you will get better performance if your data drive is separate. Similarly, you probably won’t want your scratch drive as a partition on your image drive or OS drive. Next it should be pointed out that the front portion of a drive generally offers faster performance than the middle and end of a drive, so if possible, you want your regularly accessed files stored on the earlier portion of your drives. With these in mind, I have always stored my images in dedicated image drives, usually with a smaller “fast” partition at the beginning for my current files, and the second “large” partition for older files. It is easy to move files from the fast partition to the large partition as the fast side fills up, and in this way I keep the fastest part of that drive available for current working files.
But, I had never bothered with striping those drives, primarily because of the cost involved in the extra drives and back-up drives due to reduced reliability. However, with 1TB fast SATA2 drives now selling almost everywhere for under $200, I figured the cost per gig of storage wa finally down to the point where I could justify trying it. So my current working image drive is a pair of 1TB SATA2 -- I chose Samsung Spinpoints, but know that Seagate 3200.11’s are also excellent -- the 2TB total partitioned off to a 464G “fast” working partition and the approximate 1.4TB remaining as the “large” storage partition. Both of these partitions are then software mirrored to an external storage array for safety.
So how did this work out? Well suffice it to say it basically cut my image open and save times in half! Again, not that things were “slow” on my system before, but they were taking notably longer since I moved up from 60MB or so DSLR files to a medium format back that generates 240MB image files. So adding this new working array has notably improved the file open and save experience for me.
Again only offered FWIW only, please keep in mind YMMV!
Cheers,
“A few tips I’ve gleaned on tweaking my Mac Pro’s performance“
To set the stage, I have a newer machine that is pretty high end, the Mac Pro 8-core 3.2 machine. Next let me clarify I am not any kind of computer guru or technical expert – these are just some tips I came across that made a notable difference in the performance of an already fast machine. Finally, I want to extend a special thanks to two folks who answered many of my questions offline and kept me pointed in the right direction, Bob Fruend and Lloyd Chambers. (Lloyd has an excellent website with lots of reviews and tech tips at: http://www.diglloyd.com/ .)
The first tip is regarding ram. My machine came with 2x1G ram and I immediately added 4x2G sticks for a total of 10G ram. This left 2 ram slots open for another pair should I want to increase ram in the future. Then I found a ram test that made reference to having all the ram bays full improving performance overall and was curious how significant it really would be. Here is the link: http://www.barefeats.com/harper3.html. It appears that 1) you want all ram bays full, but 2) additionally the top slot pairs should match the lower slot pairs. So it appears you get better ram throughput if you have all 8 bays full of 1G sticks than you will with 4 bays full of 2G sticks, though both are 8G ram total. It also appears that having 4x1G in every slot or 8G total is actually better throughput than my 10G configuration was. So I decided to order 2 more 1G sticks to fill up out the slots, but when I got online I discovered the 2G sticks were actually less expensive per gig than the 1G sticks, so I decided what the heck and ordered four more 2G sticks. (For those curious, Apple ram is expensive, so all my ram has come from OWC.) Okay, so now I have 16G of ram in my machine…
My first test was simply booting CS3. With the old ram configuration, CS3 booted on my machine in just over 4 seconds, which is admittedly pretty darn fast to begin with, so I did not expect any huge gain. But I was in for a surprise… With the new configuration, I was stunned when CS3 booted in under 2 seconds! Now I realize it could be the larger total of ram, or it could be all bays full, but it seems to me that 10G was already overkill for a program launch, so I am putting my money on the having all bays full scenario actually making a difference. (Important note: CS3 boot times are greatly affected by individual preference settings, file and plug-in load arrangements, so do not panic if you have longer boot times than I do with your CS3 configuration on a similar machine. I have optimized my CS3 to only load plug-ins and file formats I regularly use.) At any rate I give this a cautionary recommendation as other congiurations may not see any performance difference, but if you are looking at a ram upgrade, I think this is something to consider; it certainly worked for my set up.
~~~
The next tip is more involved, drive striping. Striping is basically a RAID 0 one two or more drives and increases performance by dividing the writing times across two or more drives for increased data throughput, yet maintains the total storage capacity of both drives. While striping can increase performance without loss of total capacity, it needs to be pointed out that it cuts reliability in half for a 2-drive stripe and more for higher multi-drive stripes. So ANY data stored on a striped array really needs to be redundantly backed up via a mirror (RAID 1) to properly insure against a total data loss. (And let me point out there are MANY different RAID strategies, so it pays to educate yourself on RAID configurations before choosing my relatively simple option below, since your needs may be better served by alternate strategies.)
First note that for optimal performance your OS swap file, CS scratch partition and image read/save drive should all be on separate physical drives for best performance. This is so those operations don’t end up competing for I/O time on the same disk when called up. In other words, it is not a good thing to work on large images stored on say your desktop if your OS swap file is located on that same physical drive, even if it is in another partition; you will get better performance if your data drive is separate. Similarly, you probably won’t want your scratch drive as a partition on your image drive or OS drive. Next it should be pointed out that the front portion of a drive generally offers faster performance than the middle and end of a drive, so if possible, you want your regularly accessed files stored on the earlier portion of your drives. With these in mind, I have always stored my images in dedicated image drives, usually with a smaller “fast” partition at the beginning for my current files, and the second “large” partition for older files. It is easy to move files from the fast partition to the large partition as the fast side fills up, and in this way I keep the fastest part of that drive available for current working files.
But, I had never bothered with striping those drives, primarily because of the cost involved in the extra drives and back-up drives due to reduced reliability. However, with 1TB fast SATA2 drives now selling almost everywhere for under $200, I figured the cost per gig of storage wa finally down to the point where I could justify trying it. So my current working image drive is a pair of 1TB SATA2 -- I chose Samsung Spinpoints, but know that Seagate 3200.11’s are also excellent -- the 2TB total partitioned off to a 464G “fast” working partition and the approximate 1.4TB remaining as the “large” storage partition. Both of these partitions are then software mirrored to an external storage array for safety.
So how did this work out? Well suffice it to say it basically cut my image open and save times in half! Again, not that things were “slow” on my system before, but they were taking notably longer since I moved up from 60MB or so DSLR files to a medium format back that generates 240MB image files. So adding this new working array has notably improved the file open and save experience for me.
Again only offered FWIW only, please keep in mind YMMV!
Cheers,
