Slow XXHE...trying to find the cause

[acg]

Hi Peter,

I have here my XXHE PC which I made myself some time ago (with your direction) except I used a second hand Xeon processor rather than the i7-3930K that was recommended at that time.  Here is a link to a specification comparison between the i7 and Xeon.  Note the only real differences are in L2/L3 cache, number of cores, bus architecture and base clock speed.

I have had another members XXHE PC here that is identical to my own with exception of the cpu...the PSU is the same, ram is the same exact model and amount, same coolers, wiring, RAM-OS and so on and so forth.  My Xeon based AudioPC takes more time to do pretty much everything than the i7, but I think that the Xeon sounds marginally better (need to do more testing of that finding).  I have compared the time it takes the two computers to perform identical XXHE related tasks both controlled from the same Music Server and both running identical XXHE settings (see below)

 

Item	Xeon	i7-3930K
Start XXHE	31s	18s
Load mixed 41 song directory from embedded Explorer	13s	8s
Play same mixed 41 song directory	2m23s	1m31s
Load Music Root in embedded Explorer	22s	4s
Load Chieftans Album WAV format	3s	3s
Play Chieftans Album WAV format	23s	18s

So you can see the difference between the two is significant.

As far as I can tell the only difference between the two PC's is the processor, but on paper the Xeon should not be so far different in performance to the i7 after underclocking, so I wonder if you can see anything else that may be causing the issue?  Or perhaps the Xeon is underclocking more than the i7? 

Regards,

Anthony

[acg]

After making the post above, I decided to update my profile so that Peter could get a better idea of what my settings are and the gear that is in use.  Well,in the Xeon RAM-OS I found two settings that were not the same..."Balanced Load" was 64 (not 63) and "Provide Stable Power" was 0 (not 1).  I changed these in W10586 RAM but they did not hold, so I booted back into W10586 Base and changed them there.  When I went back into W10586 RAM the "Provide Stable Power" had changed from 0 to 1, but the "Balanced Load" had not changed as was still on 64.  Not sure what happened there.

So I retested the Xeon and this is what I came up with:

Item	Xeon	i7-3930K
Start XXHE	18s	18s
Load mixed 41 song directory from embedded Explorer	7s	8s
Play same mixed 41 song directory	1m32s	1m31s
Load Music Root in embedded Explorer	5s	4s
Load Chieftans Album WAV format	3s	3s
Play Chieftans Album WAV format	18s	18s

So the Xeon and i7 are level pegging now that the Xtweaks settings are similar.  Peter, do you think the times similar to those you experience at your end?

And call me officially "amazed" at the performance change of the PC with one Xtweak setting changed one digit from 0 to 1.  Wow!  Not sure if I should try to get that 64 for "Balanced Load" down to 63.

[PeterSt]

Anthony,

Peter, do you think the times similar to those you experience at your end?

Maybe; With the cores curring at 720MHz :

a. Start XXHE : 14s.
b. Load Music Root : 3s (clicking at [ M ])
c. Load album (9 track WAV) : 2s.
d. Play album (9 track wav, longest is 7 minutes <- but longest only weighs in when FLAC) : 11s.

Ad c.
Can also be longer when it is about a "Cue File" album (one large file).

Ad d.
Can also be 18s; this depends largely on the speed of the disks (I have quite some and the fastest loading are indeed the fastest disks).

Ad a.
Because there's hardly network / physical disk I/O involved, this will be highly related to the cpu speed. So check yours against mine (720MHz);
Double this speed and startup time will be half (mind you, when the OS runs from RAM).
Careful : I may have this somewhat faster because I have been explicitly working on the startup time (for due 2.06).

Ad b.
This may depend on how you do it. Also, the comparison between sizes may make comparing a bit difficult; with relative few albums (300 or so) they are loaded live (you see the counter counting). With more it depends on how many and thus how large the cache file involved it. In my case it's 42K albums. Again more difficult the comparison will be because of the number of albums visible, that taking relatively significant time. In my case (at this time) it's 15.

My conclusion :
All is comparable but where not it should be about the processor core speed.

Peter