Autostakkert, CPU and RAM part 2

Sep10
by kevin on September 10, 2022 at 06:41 and modified on September 10, 2022. at 06:51
Posted In: tech


Greetings!
This is Autostakkert! v3.1.4 – 64 bit

I have gone through three computers in the last two years, that I use for astronomical image processing. Each one was a little faster than the others and where we stand today is a fairly new
Ivanova2021 win10pro64bit 21H2 Core I5-6500 @3.2GHz, 8GB; 240GB SSD 8GB DDR4 1x8GB (4 slots) sda 240GB SSD lexar sdb 6TB WDBlue data; sdc 4TB external USB3 data backup 1920×1080 HDMI; 6xUSB3; 2xUSB2 $260CDN x2DP,x1VGA BIOS 2021Nov18

And it is still TOO SLOW. I think that maybe I am processing larger images, to higher degrees of quality? So I thought.. where may there be a potential bottleneck? Don’t know… have to run some benchmarks.

Part 2 Update.
The 1x8GB DDR4 RAM stick arrived, was installed and is up and running. The benchmarks were rerun and this is the results
16GB using 12.5GB RAM 93% total in use
1/4 thread stacking 990 sec about 3% improvement
2/4 thread stacking 510 sec about 3% improvement
3/4 thread stacking 349 sec about 3% improvement
4/4 thread stacking 269 sec about 18% improvement
8GB
1/4 thread stacking 1017 sec
2/4 thread stacking 527 sec
3/4 thread stacking 363 sec
4/4 thread stacking 327 sec

You will note that it used up to 12.5GB of RAM during processing… more RAM than the whole computer did previously… so the short answer is yes, Autostakkert was RAM limited/bottlenecked with only 8GB.
I am unsure why there is such a huge improvement when using 4 threads versus the others.. will have to try some more examples I guess.

The next obvious experiment is to buy *MORE RAM* and try it again!