On Fri, 08 Jul 2016 12:37:31 -0400, Paul wrote:
Charlie Hoffpauir wrote:
My system is a Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD3H-BK board with 2 8GB DDR3 G SKILL
memory strips (16 GB total) and an Intel i5-4690 processor, set up
with two 24" monitors. I do a lot of genealogy work, and often have 8
database programs open at the same time, constantly switching between
them or copying information from one or more to my genealogy program.
Would more memory improve performance, or would having the database
programs running on a SSD be more effective? How could I tell if disk
access or limited memory was slowing down things?
At the moment, we don't know what OS you use. The
Task Manager interface varies a bit between OSes. I
expect you have a 64 bit OS, later than WinXP.
*******
The Task Manager (and a button on it that launches
Resource Monitor), provide feedback on how things
are going. I would start there.
At the moment, you have "the perfect amount of RAM",
so I would need conclusive evidence from your research,
to recommend even more of it. When you have tons
of RAM, it takes a while to fill it. So an operation
you thought might take "a second", well, it takes
25 seconds on a machine full of RAM. Some programs
only fill RAM at around 1GB/sec, even though the
STREAM benchmark runs at 17GB/sec.
Using one stick of RAM per channel, allows using XMP
RAM (automatic setup), saving a lot of messing about.
When you install a total of four sticks, the tuning
process will require more of your time, to ensure it
is error free. XMP typically supports two sticks total
with Command Rate 1T, or two sticks total with
Command Rate 2T. Since only 2T makes any sense, the
first profile is a waste of your time. While I have
heard rumors of XMP with a profile for 2 sticks and
the other profile is for 4 sticks, I certainly
don't own any of that. So I have to adjust tCAS,
memory clock, Vnb, or whatever, all by myself
when I have four sticks. Um, what fun. The last
time, it took me two days, because I did it
wrong the first time.
*******
In Task Manager, you'll be looking at the "percentage
of disk I/O" being used, to see if the disk is so slow
as to be holding things up. If doing a database lookup
causes the disk to go to 100% I/O, that would be a sign
an SSD could help.
If you look at the RAM in Task Manager, and all 16GB is
used, and the system is paging (hard fault indicator indicates
hundred of hard faults per second), then maybe I might be
convinced more RAM would help.
*******
I have a machine with a ****load of RAM (64GB).
I'm not impressed. So many things have been slower
than they should be, the list would take forever to type out.
I just bought an SSD a couple days ago. But, I put it
on a slow computer. I'm kinda impressed, but I still
see file system searches to be slow. The SSD might be
capable of 100,000 IO operations per second or so,
and yet if I use Agent Ransack to search for a file name,
the rate is not that high. The SSD might be 10x faster
than the hard drive, when looking at file names.
The operating system does not use the System File Cache
properly. There are *many* opportunities to consult
previous reads of a file stored in RAM, where the
OS goes right ahead and insists on reading the
hard drive again. This is known as an "uncached
file system call", uncached on purpose for unknown
reasons. While running uncached occasionally makes
sense, these OSes are a lot less well tuned than
Win2K was.
I haven't actually benched sequential performance on
the SSD drive yet. I'm sure it'll do 500MB/sec on a
SATA III port. You have SATA III ports on your
motherboard, so you are all set.
But I'd still study the situation with Task Manager,
before running off half-cut.
Both the SSD and the RAM are not that expensive, relatively
speaking. RAM has come down in price. So you can certainly
speculatively install them. But I don't know how much it
would bother you, if there was absolutely no improvement
after the upgrade was complete. If you value your time,
it'll take time to clone over the HDD to the SSD, as well
as time to make the new memory setup error-free.
Here's an example of a small SSD. Relatively good reviews so far.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820147360
A measure of goodness, is the "Terabyte-Writes" rating
or TBW. The last page of the spec lists it as 150TBW.
You can try comparing that figure, from one drive to
another. An Enterprise class drive would have a higher
number.
http://www.samsung.com/us/system/con...6bw/850PRO.pdf
If I compare to an Enterprise drive, this one is
"Endurance Rating (Lifetime Writes) 16.9PB", which
means the entire drive can be written about 16000
times. The other one, about 600 times.
http://ark.intel.com/products/84239/...-6Gbs-20nm-MLC
Another example.
http://thessdguy.com/comparing-dwpd-to-tbw/
You should plan for regular backups of the SSD.
Your computer should be on a UPS, for best
data safely. If a single computer is on a UPS,
you can hook the "shutdown cable" from the UPS
to the computer, and even have the
computer shut down when you are not
in the room.
Paul
Great comments Paul....
To answer a few questions you made about details I left out...
The OS was originally Win 7 64 bit Pro, now Win 10... took the plunge
and upgraded.
The computer is on a UPS... AC power out here in the country is far
from consistant, so virtually everything electronic is on a UPS (3
computers and 2 Dish network DVRs, each on it's own UPS)
My "C" drive is a SSD and all the data is on a couple of 7200 RPM SATA
drives. I was wondering if putting the large database files on an SSD
might speed things. These are large files for a home computer, 2.9 GB,
2.7 GB, 1.5 GB, etc. these are FileMaker Pro files, converted from
Access when the file size became too large for Access to handle. The
ones under 1 GB are all on MS Access. All of these as very simple
"flat" files, no complicated relationships.
Based on what you've said so far, I'm thinking that adding more memory
might not be the way I want to proceed.... I don't need the hassle of
trying to tune the memory, whereas adding an SSD for the data would
be really easy to implement.