TI11....Not using all my cores, I'm sure it used to!?

Hi there, I have installed the latest update of True Image 11 Home and just noticed that my backups are taking a while so I checked the CPU utilization and its only at 25% (I have a quad core cpu).

So 1 core being used fully...

But I'm sure that all 4 cores were being used when I was doing a backup a few months ago (But with a different version of True Image 11 Home)...

Any ideas why this may be? I can see all 4 cores are active in task manager, I have set the backup task as high priority in True Image 11 with exactly the same results...

?

Thanks,

 

Hi Robo989, welcome to the Forum

It is highly unlikely that CPU speed or utilisation would have any significant influence on ATI backup speed of execution.

By far the single most important consideration with respect to backup speed is the Operating System. If you are using the Linux interface then expect backups to take up to 10 times longer to complete than under Windows.

The next most important aspect is the hard disk (or disks) themselves and the associated disk caches.

If your backup is on the same physical disk as the source (for example if you were using ATI Secure Zone on a laptop) then the actual constraints of reading and writing using the same physical read/write head would obviously slow down the backup considerably.

If the source disk and the backup disk are two separate disks then the backup speed will to a large extent be determined by the communication channel between these disks. For example, if both disks were internal SATA disks connected to the same BUS and if both disks were of comparable speeds and cache then the backup should be reasonably fast.

If the backup disk is an external disk connected by USB then backup speed will be determined mainly by the limitations of the specific USB controller in the computer rather than the hard disk limitations.

File fragmentation on the source disk and contiguous free space on the backup disk are also factors which influence execution speed. Defrag the source disk and make sure that there is at least the size of the backup plus 20% contiguous free space on the backup disk. Therefore if the backup is going to be 40GB then the contiguous free space should be about 50GB.

If you let us know your exact system setup then we may be able to provide you with an answer that is more suited to your specific environment.

T.

 

I don't think ATI is written to take advantage of multiple cores, but anyway, as pointed out, the speed limit is going to be the disk system and (OS) hardware drivers.

 

Just did an image with maximum compression (2009Home) and when the progress bars were increasing, the total load was much greater than that of a single core. So this version at least is multi-threaded.

 

Hi Derek

I have not tested that myself but I am sure that your observations are correct.

The question arises "Why?".

Compared to microprocessors, disk speeds are akin to a snail creaping across the grass. It requires some skill and certainly some considerable development and testing time to make an application "multi-core" compatible. Products such as ATI are both disk-centric and disk-intensive.

What (if any) advantage is there is making ATI multi-core compatible? I would really like to see the comparative numbers - my suspicion is that the difference would be so small as to be irrelevant.

Perhaps developer and testing time could be better allocated to sorting out the bugs? Or is that just cynical?

T.