Hyperthreading ON vs. OFF + note on AMD

Will probably be talking to myself again but nevermind.
Perhaps someone with the same observation will find my post helpful.

Did some extensive testing recovering the same image over and over again. Recovering from Acronis bootloader full.

System: p4c 3.0Ghz 800Mhz FSB, Asus p4p800D, 2 x 512mb Mushkin, WD 8mb cache, 200Gb and 120GB.

• Image 600mb, normal compression.
  
• Inside windows it took 1 min to create
  
• With hyperthreading ON it took 25 -30 min to recover (tested 8 times)
  
• With hyperthreading OFF it took 7 - 9 min to recover (tested 8 times)
  
• For both tests there is long pauses in diskwrites. Seems like nothing is going on..

Did some tests on my friends AMD too

System Athlon xp 3800+ single core, 2 x 1Gb ram, Asus A8N-SLI, WD 8mb cache, 120GB

• Image 2.7 GB, Normal compression
  
• Took 5 min to create
  
• Took 5 min to restore (tested 4 times)
  
• Continous diskwrite. Sound like a continuos copy operation. The way it should be I think

Seems like Acronis doesn't like my system

 

Would be nice if someone from Acronis could comment....

 

While I'm not from Acronis.

First thing to keep in mind is that a HT CPU is a single core only. As far as single core 'SMP' operations with HT, there every thing is still being executed on the same core, the second core effectively makes use of the extended command cues that were dubed to be a 'feature' of the CPU. Over all benefits of these extended cues was a 10 to 15% performance increase.

While the Athlon truely is dual CPU in the sense, its not so much of a step to either be able to use both cores effectively, or to have the sense to only use one core.

Typically the system will juggle a task between cores depending on system utilisation. My guess is that for the HT machine, the act of juggling between the real core, and the virtual one will both be the reason of the slow down, and part way to expect the system to slow over all.

Unfortunately for Acronis, they haven't included the 'top' utility with the bootable media. Granted that it would have very limited use, though using top one could monitor which CPU / core the operation is being sent to, and it could be determined if this jumping, or the fact that the task is being assigned to the virtual CPU etc etc.

Its quite likely that all this means nothing... But Its just my take on what may be happening.

 

Thanx so much for reply

But I would still very much like some comment reagrding the fact that when recovering on my intel system:
there is long pauses in diskwrites. Seems like nothing is going on.. and the recover operation is so much slower on intel. Just for fun I made the same Image again with MAX compression and the recover operation took exactly the same amount of time

But the AMD system has:
Continous diskwrite. Sound like a continuos copy operation. The way it should be I think

 

Hmmm

As far as the disk reads / writes goes, I haven't a clue. Have you got your self a Bart PE disk? It may be worth loading up the Acronis plug in and seeing if the same issue occours, both with HT en and disabled.

Its possible that its using the wrong driver for your chipset and doesn't know what to do with the drive half the time. The Bart PE would half assist in pointing this out as it'd be using the windows drivers for it instead of the *nix ones.

 

That seems like a reasonable deduction. Recovering from within windows works like a charm so I do believe it's a missing driver issue. However I really don't want to use more time making this work. Acronis should fix this.
<snip>

edited to remove off-topic remark - Detox

 

Ouch sorry

 

Hmmm.

I have a p4 HT box at home.. I'll throw in a spare drive and try a restore to it and see how it behaves with HT enabled and disabled. Though its quite possible my board wont' have the same issue which is why it may be worth your doing it if you get a moment.

 

Would be very intrested in knowing if Acronis behaves the same at your BOX

 

From an earlier time test:

Asus P4P800 (not deluxe), 2.8Ghz P4, 2x512MB Corsair RAM, 2 SATA1 drives, image created/restored from internal SATA drive, HT enabled:

Create 5GB normal compressed image of C in Windows - 3:38

Restore the image to C (Linux mode required) - 5:09

I don't recall any long times between disk accesses.

 

Ok thanx for info. Must be something else in my config Acronis doesn't like then