In my company GIS applications are very important. To improve performance some 6000 Euro have been spent on a new PC (2x4 core XEONS with 12 MB L2 Cache, Raid Controller, fast memory, etc.). Theoretically the new PC should be at least twice as powerful as a 2 years old PC which it replaces as the major workhorse. Comparative tests have shown ZERO improvement in execution times. The tests done so far involve extensive floating point calculations and DB I/O (calculating the area of parcels, creating shapes for some 4000 polygons and doing the I/O for ORACLE). DB connection is done via ORACLE 11g2 (with latest patches). OS is XP 32 prof. SP3. Microstaton XM in the latest download version is used.
Performace has always been an issue and on older PCs of the pentium class the programms have run for hours on end (10 and more hours). Upgrading hardware on an almost yearly basis has always brought down execution times but not this time. This last and most costly hardware update done right now has shown no improvement at all which is very, very frustrating.
The programms in question have been developed over almost 10 years and the company who is doing this says it would be difficult to isolate the relevant code so that it could be testet meaningfully in another environment.
Any ideas, suggestions or explanations are welcome. It must be also of concern to Bentley if Microstation does not seem to make use of advancements in hardware. I had great hopes to cut down the many 3 Minutes plus waiting times which cannot be used otherwise. These hopes has been crushed so far.
Regards
Erwin
Erwin,
You didn't say whether you were running a single or dual screens on your new computer. In addition to the myriad of variables that Phil previously mentioned, if you are running dual screens, there is one other setting that is a complete performance killer. Many of our GIS power users and some of our CAD users were complaining about how ArcGIS and Microstation were running so slowly, even with our new , very high-end computers. Most of my Microstation users that I had set up were not experiencing these same slowdowns. It was not until we ran Bentley's Graphics Benchmark test on all of our computers did we see a pattern develop. While RAM and VRAM memory, the model of nVidia graphics card and the number of CPU processors all made a difference in performance, the biggest culprit that killed performance was whether we had a single desktop spanned across both screens or had the screens configured independently of one another. Those of us who had no performance problems had our desktop spanned across both screens ( resolution 2560 x 960 , screen # 1a and # 1b ). Our performance numbers were 8x to 10x faster than the secondary monitor of those whose displays were configured independently ( resolution 1280 x 960 on each, screen # 1 and # 2 ). Raster images and multiple layer repaints in GIS and rendering and 3D model manipulation, usually done on the right hand screen ( usually screen # 2 ) were painfully slow. Performance on screen # 1 was usually much better. When we changed their independent screen setup to a horizontal span setup, this performance penalty disappeared. Just remember to reconfigure your dialog boxes to open in the middle of one monitor or the other or they will now open spanned across the "gutter" between the two monitors. Very annoying. Hope this helps......
Jim