From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: April 9, 2008 11:10:00 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] ASTRO IIDC CPU LOAD

On 9-Apr-08, at 10:25 PM, doodlebun wrote:

I routinely do a lot of video compressing and 3d rendering with a lot of apps. I'm using a 

2.33 Ghz  dual processor dual core G5. My menu meter routinely tracks cpu usage. It is 

typical for the programs I just mentioned to use 90-95% CPU. Astro IIDC seems to be set to 

use 50%, CPU load,  take it or leave it.  Is there a way to boost it to 90%?

Your not clear on what your doing with it that you expect 95% CPU usage, but I would guess your talking about stacking?

Astro IIDC isn't set to any particular loading and it runs as fast as hardware I/O allows.

The slowest part of the stacking process is pulling frames from disk and the larger the frames are and higher the bit depth the slower it is (i.e. each frame takes a significant amount of time to load) . Most drives on the G5's are only rated for about 25 to 35 megabytes per second and the CPU is not involved with loading data from disk. So one thread is pulling in frames (and doing a bit of analysis on them) and the other thread is doing the heavy lifting / processing on them. If the load time from disk is slow, then the CPU sits idle waiting for more data.

Also, it depends on what options your using for stacking too. If you are scaling, using higher quality bayer or per frame sharpening, then you'll get into the 80 to 95% range for both CPU's (as shown in the Activity Monitor).

HTH..

Milton J. Aupperle