PC SUPER guru question

I need a serious PC / Windows Guru.

Here is the situation. I am running a circuit simulation on LTSpice. The software supports up to 8 threads. My machine is taking nearly twice as long to run the same simulation as my co-workers. Heres the issue. My machine is a Core i7 2670, 8gb of ram, and SSD. His is a Petium dual core T4500 with 3 gig of ram. when the simulation runs on his machine it utilizes %100 of the CPU. Mine it is only using %28. It seems that something in windows is blocking the software from using all the cores. I cant seem to figure out why. I have turned all the power setting to performance.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

Some thoughts...

- Open windows task manager and click the Performance tab. Run your sim and see how many cpu cores are loading up.
- Do you know if other software is correctly using all cores?
- Are you both running the same OS? 64/32 bit version? What about that program itself?
- Run CPU-Z (http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html) and check see what it says for your CPUs current operation .. cores, speeds, etc is all shown in real time.
- Could be something is turned off or otherwise not configured right in your BIOS if the issue affects all programs.

 

Set the priority in the task manager to high.

 

Both running windows 7 64 bit and the same version of the simulation software. , the only odd thing i see in the resource monitor is that some cores bounce between parked and running during a sim run, I checked through the BIOs... there is not much I can change on this thing.

Tried this already.

 

I know nothing of LTSpice so this is just based on a google search and might be outdated. One guy mentioned although it allows up to 8 threads, it defaults to 2 which would give close to your 28% utilization. Have you changed Max Threads settings in the LTSpice control panel?

 

This is what I was thinking as well and I also know nothing about LTSpice..

 

Does you processor have hyperthreading? try turning it off in the bios, this may or may not help. Hyperthreading makes windows think you have twice as many procs as you really do. It gives two queue lines for each proc. If you fill all the available queues, you may not see "100%" processing because both queues are full and it can only process so much at a time.

 

Bingo! you are the MAN! I'm running the Simulation 3x faster than my co-worker now.

 

Weird! When un-checked, that is supposed to default to use all available cores...
I wonder what happened there. Good info 05stram... will have to remember that one.

 

So this Didnt actually fix it. Turns out it was faster because I was at home accessing a locally stored version of the sim file. Turns out that even though to application fully loads the sim and doesnt need to access the file anymore that running the sim file from my network drastically slows it down. I can load it from the network and then disconnect from the network and the sim runs just as fast as it did last night with no problems. So i dont think its actively still accessing the file. but for some reason having running the sim from the network and then staying plugged in causes it to run really slow. From now on i will copy the sims locally and run them that way. thanks for all the suggestions.

 

Turns out what it does is build a file while it runs the sim with pure data in it. Obviously this is SLLLLOOOWW across the network.