Pentium 4 Laptop Performance

[txshonk]

I have an old Sony Vaio Laptop that I have been toying with SAC on. Primarily thinking of using it as a back up system. It will run 26 ins with FOH and 5 monitor mixes and get 45% - 60% CPU usage with 2-128 buffers.

Here is the problem - during the course of letting it SAC will eventually begin a steady increase in CPU usage and then the laptop eventually freezes. Sometimes it will do it after an hour or two other times after 10 mins.

I have played with various tweaks. I have done the and have now started disabling hardware hoping to find a cause for the CPU rise. However no luck yet.

I was wondering if anyone had any ideas, or am I just hoping for too much out of this machine?

Intel Pentium (R) 4 2.8GHz
Windows XP SP2 Home Edition
1gb RAM
ATI Radeon Graphics Processor
RME Cardbus/Digiface

[AudioAstronomer]

Can you post a screengrab of your taskmanager processes?

[Bob L]

Are you using plugins on certain channels? If so... which ones... many floating point plugins are prone to this kind of cpu problem due to a buried floating point bug that causes an ever increasing cpu load when processing numbers very near zero... in the case of SAC... running for a while... there may be long periods of passing blank buffers...

Special bypass code is needed when dealing with floating point processing and near-zero buffer data.

Bob L

[txshonk]

here you go....

let me know what you think.

dave

[txshonk]

Bob -

the only plugs I on testing this laptop are:

1 instance of Studio Graphic Eq
1 instance of SawStudio FreeVerb

[AudioAstronomer]

I'd start by uninstalling bonjour, and see how that helps.

---

This is also a common symptom of having a bad stick of ram. As the system's memory requirement increases, the likelihood of hitting a bad cell on the 'bad ram' increases. A system with a bad memory cell can work for years until one day you start getting in the habit of using a lot of memory.. and then it becomes very confusing as to what's going wrong :cool:

Only way to check for this is to remove one stick at a time and work as normal, as well as trying to overload the system (lots of ram usage! Open lots of plugins, wave files, web browsers etc...) and see if you can make it crash. If you can on one stick and not on the other then you know the problem.

---

btw, you're not at all asking for too much out of the machine. I've a similar machine (same specs) that I worked for over a year doing live work with Sawstudio (before SAC) and I was running much more than what you describe :)

[Pedro Itriago]

There's another thing I wouldn't leave out as the culprit on a P4 laptop: Heat.

It will show itself as CPU overload because the OS will throtle the CPU down to try and cool it (or rather not to keep getting hotter). Lower CPU clock= higher CPU loads.

Watch the CPU frequency when the problem appears. If it goes down, you have a heating issue.

[Bob L]

Not sure if Freeverb is subject to the floating point bug... I would un-patch it and test again.

Bob L

[DominicPerry]

You need to add "CPU Time" as a column to the Task Manager, restart the machine, and then run SAC and see what is taking the CPU time.
If it's something other than SAC you can kill it or fix it, if it's SAC you will need to unpatch all your plug ins and then restart and try again. The restarts are necessary because CPU time is calculated from boot, regardless of whether you have task manager running.

Dominic

[Craig Allen]

Not sure if Freeverb is subject to the floating point bug... I would un-patch it and test again.

Bob L

It's worth a shot, but I've used Freeverb at countless live gigs back when I was using SAW in live mode years ago. I never had an issue like this on my Toshiba Centrino 1.6G laptop with 512M ram.

[kruntz]

This is also a common symptom of having a bad stick of ram. As the system's memory requirement increases, the likelihood of hitting a bad cell on the 'bad ram' increases. A system with a bad memory cell can work for years until one day you start getting in the habit of using a lot of memory.. and then it becomes very confusing as to what's going wrong

If this is the problem, this: http://www.memtest.org/ would find it with only one iteration.
I found a lot of bad memory sticks with it and saved some otherwise doomed machines...
Just burn the ISO on a CD and boot from it.

[AudioAstronomer]

There's another thing I wouldn't leave out as the culprit on a P4 laptop: Heat.

It will show itself as CPU overload because the OS will throtle the CPU down to try and cool it (or rather not to keep getting hotter). Lower CPU clock= higher CPU loads.

Watch the CPU frequency when the problem appears. If it goes down, you have a heating issue.

To check this, you can install speedfan (http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php) and watch carefully. On a p4 system, anything greater than 70c (~160f) is too high and you're likely running into trouble. 40-50c is good, and 60c is generally average for generic/cheap heatsink solutions that often were used on OEM's in a lot of laptops.

If this IS the case (and it's not bad memory, or bonjour, or a plugin) then you likely just need to blast the dust out of your cpu heatsink.

[AudioAstronomer]

If this is the problem, this: http://www.memtest.org/ would find it with only one iteration.
I found a lot of bad memory sticks with it and saved some otherwise doomed machines...
Just burn the ISO on a CD and boot from it.

Good idea :D

I used memtest86 along while ago and it did not work as 'advertised', and I've never thought to look at it again. :o

[IraSeigel]

here you go....

let me know what you think.

dave

Thanks Dave for posting your Task Manager screenshot. It helped me realize how many unnecessary processes I STILL have running in the background. I'm Googling each one and finding out what they do and if it's safe to delete (msmsgs.exe, ctfmon.exe, something about Windows Live login proxy, etc).

Also, thanks for the Bonjour mention Robert.

Regards,
Ira

[Warren]

Thanks Dave for posting your Task Manager screenshot. It helped me realize how many unnecessary processes I STILL have running in the background. I'm Googling each one and finding out what they do and if it's safe to delete (msmsgs.exe, ctfmon.exe, something about Windows Live login proxy, etc).

Also, thanks for the Bonjour mention Robert.

Regards,
Ira

msmsgs.exe - delete (messaging)
ctfmon.exe, not sure if you need it
Windows Live login proxy delete

Be advised these services will come back when you reboot, unless the services are set to manual or disabled.
But you already knew that.
Chris

[txshonk]

Everyone -

Thanks everyone for the posts - I continue to be impressed by the SAW/SAC community.

I think Pedro had the real culprit - heat. And true to Roberts temperature post when the CPU reached 70C + the problem arises. I have tore the laptop apart cleaned the heatsink and will be sure to use a laptop cooler and see what happens.

But will also go through services and disable more services if I am gonna use this machine as a backup for SAC.

Thanks again

Dave

[Pedro Itriago]

I'm Googling each one and finding out what they do and if it's safe to delete (msmsgs.exe, ctfmon.exe, something about Windows Live login proxy, etc).

Also, thanks for the Bonjour mention Robert.

Regards,
Ira

msmsgs is microsoft messenger. You must have it set to start with windows. So is the Windows Live login proxy. All 2 part of MS Live Messenger.

**********EDIT***********

Ooops, I saw Warren had it covered.

[IraSeigel]

msmsgs.exe - delete (messaging)
ctfmon.exe, not sure if you need it
Windows Live login proxy delete

Be advised these services will come back when you reboot, unless the services are set to manual or disabled.
But you already knew that.
Chris

About ctfmon.exe: http://www.pchell.com/support/ctfmon.shtml

[Warren]

About ctfmon.exe: http://www.pchell.com/support/ctfmon.shtml

Thanks Ira:
although I don't have it loading, its nice to know what to do, when I see it.

Thanks for the research info

Chris