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Internet Explorer 8

Posted on 6 Nov 2008 at 15:41

Jon Honeyball casts a critical eye over the latest version of ie, and discovers if ashampoo core tuner can boost his processor power.

3B Software sells a product called Ashampoo Core Tuner for Windows. Clearly a name like Ashampoo is going to get anyone's attention, but anyone who's used its products on the cover disc will realise it's a reputable company. Reading the description began just fine: "Almost all modern computers have at least two processors, which are generally referred to as cores. Some even have four." Well, yes, this is indeed true. Unfortunately, things start to slide downhill in the next sentence: "Unfortunately, Windows often doesn't manage your multiple cores very well, so you're not actually getting the full multi-processor power you paid for." Er, what? No, it gets better: "Ashampoo Core Tuner enables you to use the full power of all your cores. For instant results you just need to select Auto-Optimize to optimise all the programs you are running or Boost to give more power to a single program. You can also fine-tune individual processes, display a live view of the current workloads of all your processor cores and enhance the overall performance of your system with additional tools."

I admit, I started to laugh at this point - so what this tool does is allow you to fiddle with the thread priority levels and the affinities of a chosen process. Now let's consider this for a moment. There are threads running all the time inside a Windows system, well over 100 of them normally, even when a machine has just been booted. Most are idling, but some are doing work all the time. Whenever you run an application it will launch multiple processes and threads, distributed across the available processors by the internal threading engine of Windows. It considers which processor is currently most lightly loaded and will place more workload onto it as a best-fit to the available load and unused capacity. Some threads will move between processors if this is deigned to be optimum.

If you launch the Task Manager and go to its Processes tab, you can click on a process and then set its affinity. Just uncheck the processors that you wish this task to avoid and it won't run on that processor. Similarly, you can manually choose to change the priority level from a quietly trundling background level all the way up to real-time. Take great care here, because if you allow an application a higher priority than the tangled web of operating system services that feed it, you can get into a real mess - it's possible to end up having an application run faster than, for example, the filesystem, which isn't a very good idea.

So you already have all the tools to adjust this stuff on your machine, but no-one ever does. This clearly raises the question: why don't we all fiddle with this stuff more? Because no-one cares is the simple answer. At the end of the day, the thread dispatcher engine inside Windows has been tuned and retuned over 20 years by some incredibly bright people, who spend their whole day worrying about workload and processors and affinity and base priorities. Whenever I've cheekily suggested that users should be encouraged to fiddle with these settings, it's induced almost full-blown panic in the Microsoftie I'm addressing, who says that this shouldn't be adjusted under any circumstances unless you really know what you're doing, and if you do, you know where and how to adjust them already.

There are two classes of application for which you might want to adjust processor affinity and base priority level. The first is the traditional high-performance RDBMS database engine, where you might want to ensure that SQL Server or Oracle can have a whole processor (or several) just to itself, leaving the rest of the computer to do the remainder of the work. This is, however, a super specialist use and frankly most of the decent RDBMS software tools will let you set this up from their management interfaces anyway. Another school of thought says that if you need to fiddle with thread priorities and affinities in this fashion, it's really time to buy a dedicated computer for the job. The other case is when you're running multiple virtual machines on a server, where again you might want to reserve some underlying physical hardware for a particular machine. But again, I defy you to do this better than with the provided tools.

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