Suggest upgrade options for improving performance.

[heramb2]

Hi,

I have following laptop:

Dell Latitude E6420
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2720QM (2.2GHz, 6M cache) with Turbo Boost Technology
8GB (2x4GB) 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM
500GB 7200rpm Hard Drive

For most of my work this is quite good, however, I have to often run a tool which take about 10 to 12 hours to finish its work. We recently saw that the same tool runs faster on other machines with more memory and more CPU power.

So obviously I started thinking about upgrading my laptop at least with more memory and may be a SSD drive.

But before ordering the RAM and the SSD, I just observed the state of my machine when the tool was running. What I observed that the CPU performance was always below 12 percent when the tool was running. The RAM usage never exceeded 6 GB. Now this puzzles me a lot. Is it actually going to improved the performance by increasing the RAM? Will it use more memory when available memory is increase, say to 16 GB?

I do not have any numbers regarding disk i/o, but the disk activity of the tool was more or less sporadic in nature.

This all is confusing, what might be the reason, the tool takes this long to finish?

How can I make it faster?

It is not a Java based tool, where most of the times the memory usage is restricted. I think the tool is developed in C++ and as such there are no built in limits to how much memory it can use.

What I also notice is that the cooling fans run with very high speed when the tool is running and spew out lot of hot air.

Please suggest any option to improve the performance.

Regards,
Heramb

 

[hang-the-9]

Cooling fan running during processor activity is normal. Although the CPU running at that low of a % is a bit odd, but that also depends on this "tool" you are talking about. No way to say anything about this without knowing what this other machine was in comparison.

An SSD should make things faster if the program reads data off the disk more than doing calculations. Did you work with the support people for whatever program you are talking about?

 

[heramb2]

Ok. Some more information about the tool. It is a static code analysis tool which reads source code file, such as Java or C++ files, and computes some metrics for each source file and stores the metric values in an RDBMS. All reads and writes happen to only one disk on my laptop. Most of the times the files are very small, at the most 4000 text lines. But the number of files is very high, almost 4000 to 6000 files.

I will try to get the configuration of the other faster laptop tomorrow.

Does the cooling fan also run faster due to more disk activity?

 

[hang-the-9]

Ok. Some more information about the tool. It is a static code analysis tool which reads source code file, such as Java or C++ files, and computes some metrics for each source file and stores the metric values in an RDBMS. All reads and writes happen to only one disk on my laptop. Most of the times the files are very small, at the most 4000 text lines. But the number of files is very high, almost 4000 to 6000 files.

I will try to get the configuration of the other faster laptop tomorrow.

Does the cooling fan also run faster due to more disk activity?

It will run when the system detects temperatures high enough to cause it to run. Just disk activity without the CPU doing anything should not kick off the fan to run faster. But if you have a normal drive and the system spins that up, it may cause the fan to run also. All depends on how the people that made the laptop set it up.