Do I need a new computer?

Don Cicchetti

Hi all,

I have a 5 year old Dell Inspiron 6400 with 1G of RAM and XP. When I run LA, it can take more than a minute to save or save as, and when going online to the hardware, it can take a very long time to get on.

I have 5 pages of parameter presets and they include lots of parametric EQ's and whatnot.

SW Green ran like a top on this same machine. Why am I having so much trouble with LA? Is the computer not up to it? Hard to imagine, but if that is not it, than LA is to blame. Yes I have the latest version.

thanks

Don

mupi2k

I am not necessarily well versed in the specs of Dell computers, however, in the Help menu of LA, there's a section that includes the minimum and recommended specs. 1GB should be \"enough\", although pretty much all of my systems are configured with 2 or more.

One thing to check is if you are set to save the design file to the device network when going online; this will greatly increase the time it takes to get online.

FWIW, my file takes more than 2 minutes to do a save, and takes about forever to save to device network. On the other hand, I have a rather large file... it was almost 10MB becuase I figured out how to do things more efficiently. It's still above 5MB, which I'm told is large for the number of devices I have, and I know affects the performance of LA, but I do a LOT of logic, too.

Don Cicchetti

Thanks for the help. I'm sorry but something is not right with LA to take that long to save or save as. I can save a 10meg photo on the mac in photoshop in a few seconds. Why does LA take so long?

dc

Dan Lynch

\Don Cicchetti\ wrote:

Why does LA take so long?

Are you complaining about going online or saving? They're completely different things. I'm not really sure why it's relevant that you can save a different file type on a different computer \"in a few seconds\", but I can save an 18.8meg file from London Architect in slightly less than 17 seconds.

Possibility #1: Your file is monkeyed up in some way and London Architect is being forced to spend time defragmenting or cleaning up the database every time you save. When you save the file, London Architect has to clean up your messes. That includes multiple UNDO buffers, possibly fragmented databse entries, etc. To check for one aspect of this, save the file and time it. Close the file. Reopen the file. Save the file and time it. If the two times are different, then LA was spending time cleaning up before the first save.

Possibility #2: Your hard drive is badly fragmented or is a really slow drive. Or it's a network drive with a slow connection or a bad lookup table. Pretty self explanatory.

Possibility #3: Your file is ridiculously large.
A) Too many DSPs in one file. The 18meg file I just mentioned has 64 BLU-160s in it with 61 of them programmed to 47% DSP usage. In my opinion, that's a ridiculous file and 17 seconds is pretty respectable when dealing with something that silly.
How many archived eventlogs are you keeping? Look on the General tab of TOOLS | FILE PREFERENCES. If you're keeping lots of eventlogs, the design file is going to balloon up for no benefit.
C) Do you have tons of graphics imported into your control panels? Again, bigger files take more time to save.
D) Do you have a bunch of dynamic matrices? They take up huge amounts of room in the design file. Converting them to fixed inputs will make a big difference, especially if they're small matrices.

If what you're actually complaining about is going online, go to TOOLS | APPLICATION PREFERENCES and look at the FILE tab. In the box for Save to Device Network, what does the drop-down say? If it says \"Yes\", then you've made a decision that is negatively effecting performance. If you don't like that, change it to \"No\".

Finally, \"5 year old Dell Inspiron\"... when was the last time Windows was reinstalled? Hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and look at the Performance tab. Under Physical Memory, how much is listed as \"Available\"? London Architect will used between 150 and 300 meg of RAM in most cases. If you don't have enough free RAM available, then you end up swapping stuff to the Windows Page File and that's REALLY slow. Are you running widgets on your desktop (Windows, Google, Yahoo, etc)? They're those little things that tell you the temp in Bombay or show you a slide show of your pictures on your Windows desktop. If so, why? They're using system resources that should be going towards getting the job done. What other programs are running on the computer? Depending on configuration (POP3 vs Exchange), Outlook is either a big RAM hog or a freaking RAM hog nightmare. How many icons are there in your Windows system tray? If there are more than 6, it's probably time to start evaluating priorities.

Will London Architect run on a computer with a 2Ghz processor and 1gig of RAM? Absolutely. Will it run quickly on that machine when there's also 5 years worth of accumlated stuff also running on it? Maybe, maybe not.

Dan

Don Cicchetti

Thanks for the help Dan. I responded on Friday, but that post is missing.. ?

Specific responses:

1. It's really slow going online or saving files. 2 minutes to go online, and close to a minute to save an 11meg file.

2. I did your test with saving and closing and they were very close in times.

3. The HD is not fragmented.

4 no graphics imported into the file

5. I will try your suggestions to improve speed going online and report back.

6. Windows XP was installed clean on a new Seagate HD 6 months ago.

7. no widgets, no other apps running.

d

Dan Lynch

Dang. You couldn't even play along to make a Monday easier and pretend to have one of the simple issue?

It sounds like you should contact tech support and send in your file. It's possible, even though it's unlikely, that there may be something wacky in your file that's causing this.

Dan

Don Cicchetti

Will do. Thanks Dan!


dc