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  #61  
Old 01-20-2003, 10:08 AM
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clausb clausb is offline
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May,

spoolsv.exe is the printer spooler process. Googling for it shows that there are some circumstances where spoolsv.exe will consume CPU time again and again; see, for example, the discussion at http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/t1032564815.

viewbench does not try to start any print jobs, however, so my assumption initially was that the printer spooler already starts consuming CPU cycles well before you start the benchmark.

Then I re-ran some tests on my machine (which runs W2K) - and all of I sudden I could reproduce those hangups. I also observed that spoolsv.exe consumed a few percent of CPU time every now and then, and that the "Printer" applet (Start/Settings/Printers) indicated that the local printer spooler had problems contacting some printers on our local print server machine.

So here's my hypothesis: To collect configuration data, viewbench calls Microsoft's msinfo32 utility. This utility scans all kinds of data, probably including status data of the printer spooler. If the printer spooler process hangs for some reason, msinfo32 will also hang - and viewbench will wait forever for the configuration data and never start running its tests.

When I found this, I modified some of the parameters which I pass to msinfo32 so that it will only look at certain aspects of the local machine's configuration and avoid polling the printer server status. And guess what, I cannot reproduce the hangup anymore now.

I just uploaded the improved viewbench code to ftp://ftp.cocreate.com/sdtestpackage/viewbench. Hope this will also fix the issue found on your test machine.

Thanks for sharing your observation!

Claus

Last edited by clausb; 01-20-2003 at 11:29 AM.
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  #62  
Old 01-20-2003, 12:27 PM
May Kung May Kung is offline
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I just tried the latest benchmark on the cranky workstation here, and it still hangs on SPOOLSV.exe. The Dell 530, although it has different hardware, is pretty similarly configured, and it doesn't hang.

I'm wondering if this has anything to do with Novell Netware, as the Dell 530 is not running Novell Netware, while the Dell 420 (problem station) is. I'll try to see if there is a way I can temporarily disable the Netware client on this machine to test this out.
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  #63  
Old 01-20-2003, 02:15 PM
May Kung May Kung is offline
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This is on an older Silicon Graphics workstation we used to run.

Model: SGI-320_ARCx86
CPU: PIII @ 500 MHz
RAM: 1 GB
Graphics: SGI Cobalt
OS: Win NT4 w/ SP5
Version: SD 9.01D
Attached Files
File Type: txt perf_viewbench_wdc00012550sjd.txt (3.0 KB, 488 views)
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  #64  
Old 01-21-2003, 08:50 AM
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Quote:
Originally posted by John Scheffel
I will run some tests on my PC with different Modeling window sizes to see how much it affects the result.
I tried running viewbench on my PC with the resolution reduced to 1024x768. It did produce better results than the 1280x1024 results I posted earlier.

1280x1024 - 564.824
1024x768 - 526.082

Not dramatic, but faster.
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  #65  
Old 01-21-2003, 08:53 AM
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I have updated the file at http://www.cocreateusers.org/misc/viewbench_results.html
with the lastest results provided by Claus. You may have to refresh your browser window to see the latest version.
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  #66  
Old 01-21-2003, 02:05 PM
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Question Is CPU Speed a Major Factor?

Looking over the latest results, I was surprised by how slow the Quadro 4 results posted by jmobley are. I would have expected faster performance from these cards. They are quite a bit slower than the Dell laptop with the mobile version of the chip. Looking at the other specs the main difference seems to be the CPU speed. Most of the PCs jmobley posted are 600-900 MHz, but the Dell Laptop is 1.8 GHz.

I didn't expect the CPU to be that much of factor for graphics performance, but maybe it is. Another possibility might be the AGP slot. Most newer PCs and AGP cards are rated 4x, but older PCs were only 1x or 2x. Whatever the reason, the best specs seem to be coming from the PCs with fastest CPUs. Just for grins I did a quick plot of results versus CPU speed (see attachment). Although there are some points way off the line, there does seem to be some correlation. Of course it could just be that the PCs with faster CPUs are newer and in general have better graphics cards, faster bus speeds, faster memory, etc.

Another surprise is the Erazor X2 results. These are pretty old cards to be ranking where they are, and were not targetted to the CAD market.
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Name:	viewbench_cpu.gif
Views:	506
Size:	8.2 KB
ID:	69  
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  #67  
Old 01-21-2003, 02:05 PM
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Question Is CPU Speed a Major Factor?

Looking over the latest results, I was surprised by how slow the Quadro 4 results posted by jmobley are. I would have expected faster performance from these cards. They are quite a bit slower than the Dell laptop with the mobile version of the chip. Looking at the other specs the main difference seems to be the CPU speed. Most of the PCs jmobley posted are 600-900 MHz, but the Dell Laptop is 1.8 GHz.

I didn't expect the CPU to be that much of factor for graphics performance, but maybe it is. Another possibility might be the AGP slot. Most newer PCs and AGP cards are rated 4x, but older PCs were only 1x or 2x. Whatever the reason, the best specs seem to be coming from the PCs with fastest CPUs. Just for grins I did a quick plot of results versus CPU speed (see attachment). Although there are some points way off the line, there does seem to be some correlation. Of course it could just be that the PCs with faster CPUs are newer and in general have better graphics cards, faster bus speeds, faster memory, etc.

Another surprise is the Erazor X2 results. These are pretty old cards to be ranking where they are, and were not targetted to the CAD market.
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Views:	493
Size:	8.2 KB
ID:	70  
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  #68  
Old 01-24-2003, 01:14 PM
May Kung May Kung is offline
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Quick question. Is it the same method of running Viewbench between a Win2K workstation and a HP-UX box? I get an error message when I type:

(load "viewbench")

in SD 9. It says it was a LISP error and was unable to load the library file. Am I doing something wrong?
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  #69  
Old 01-24-2003, 11:36 PM
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May,

running viewbench works the same on all platforms. The version of viewbench which I posted to our external web site was compiled using OSDM 2002+, so there is, in fact, a small chance that it won't work properly in older versions.

What does the LISP error message say exactly? Is there any additional output in the shell window where you started OSDM?

Claus
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  #70  
Old 01-27-2003, 02:03 PM
May Kung May Kung is offline
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The exact error message says:

LISP error: Loading shared library failed for viewbench.
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  #71  
Old 02-04-2003, 01:30 PM
jmobley jmobley is offline
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Model: Premio (custom built)
CPU: Intel Pentium III 700 MHz
RAM: 512 MB
Graphics: ATI FireGL 8700 64MB
OS: Microsoft Windows NT Ver 4.0 Build 1381 SP 6
Version: SD 9.01
Attached Files
File Type: txt perf_viewbench_pre03609.txt (3.0 KB, 500 views)
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  #72  
Old 02-04-2003, 01:34 PM
jmobley jmobley is offline
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Model: IBM Intellistation M Pro
CPU: Intel Pentium IV 2.0 GHz
RAM: 512 MB
Graphics: NVIDIA Quadro4 550 XGL 64MB
OS: Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional 5.0 SP 2 Build 2195
Version: SD 9.01

I think this proves that the processor has a lot to do with this test.
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File Type: txt perf_viewbench_ibm03694.txt (3.1 KB, 482 views)
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  #73  
Old 02-04-2003, 01:41 PM
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Quote:
Originally posted by May Kung
The exact error message says:

LISP error: Loading shared library failed for viewbench.
Turns out that the viewbench code for HP-UX was linked on an HP-UX 11 machine, and May was trying to run it on HP-UX 10.20. I just moved to an HP-UX 11 workstation, and so I don't intend to produce HP-UX 10.20 bits anymore unless it is needed REALLY urgently, sorry.

I also find the correlation between viewbench results and CPU speed highly interesting. Food for thought.

Claus
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  #74  
Old 02-04-2003, 04:38 PM
May Kung May Kung is offline
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No problem, Claus. When we finally migrate to OSD 11.X (in a few months, I hope!), we'll have to migrate the Unix boxes to HP-UX 11. We can run the benchmark then.
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  #75  
Old 03-25-2003, 08:18 AM
May Kung May Kung is offline
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Here's one more, off a new Dell 650 workstation. It's doing worse than our older 530 stations, so I'm wondering if there is a problem with less-than-optimized drivers or something.

Configuration as follows:

Dell 650
P4 2.8 GHz
1 GB RDRAM
Wildcat 7110
Windows 2000 w/ SP2
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File Type: txt dell_650.txt (3.1 KB, 491 views)
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