Interpretation of Taskmanager

Hi
I'm running Server 2003 Standard x64 version on a dual-core AMD64
motherboard..
When running a 64 bits application like 7zip (64 bits version) for the
compreession of large files, I see in Taskmanager it uses 85-95 % of the
CPU.
When running a 32 bits application, for example Ulead's VideoStudio for
video-editing, I see it uses a little less than 50 %.
Question: am I correct if interpreting that the 64 bit application uses both
CPU's, and that the 32 bits uses one CPU?
Thank you.
Paul Casman

Tony
Sat Mar 22 04:31:10 PDT 2008

You can set an option in TM under Menu Item 'View' to have one graph per CPU
or one graph that combines the two, this should let you see what is going
on.

My guess is that, in your case, 7Zip is a more CPU intensive app, while
Video Studio is able to delegate some workload to the GPU. And note that
archiving app's are frequently used in CPU benchmarking!

It is my impression that very few app's are written to explicitely put
threads on specific CPU's, even when they are available. And, personally, I
think the OS does a fair job, although everyone does not agree - caching
priorities may fool the Windows Scheduler, perhaps?


Tony. . .



"Paul C" <me@somewhere> wrote in message
news:47e4df36$0$2953$ba620e4c@news.skynet.be...
> Hi
> I'm running Server 2003 Standard x64 version on a dual-core AMD64
> motherboard..
> When running a 64 bits application like 7zip (64 bits version) for the
> compreession of large files, I see in Taskmanager it uses 85-95 % of the
> CPU.
> When running a 32 bits application, for example Ulead's VideoStudio for
> video-editing, I see it uses a little less than 50 %.
> Question: am I correct if interpreting that the 64 bit application uses
both
> CPU's, and that the 32 bits uses one CPU?
> Thank you.
> Paul Casman
>
>

Charlie
Sat Mar 22 08:26:31 PDT 2008

As Tony says, you can change the view in Task Manager to see each CPU and
its usage. The difference in CPU usage has nothing to do with 64-bit versus
32-bit, but does have something to do with how the application was written.
Some applications are able to utilize more than one CPU if there is more
than one present, since they have more than one thread or process running
when there are more CPUs present. Other applications are single threaded and
it doesn't really matter how many CPUs you have, they'll only use one of
them. This is also controlled by the OS itself, which manages how CPUs are
assigned to applications as they request processor time.

--
Charlie.
http://msmvps.com/xperts64
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/charlie.russel


"Paul C" <me@somewhere> wrote in message
news:47e4df36$0$2953$ba620e4c@news.skynet.be...
> Hi
> I'm running Server 2003 Standard x64 version on a dual-core AMD64
> motherboard..
> When running a 64 bits application like 7zip (64 bits version) for the
> compreession of large files, I see in Taskmanager it uses 85-95 % of the
> CPU.
> When running a 32 bits application, for example Ulead's VideoStudio for
> video-editing, I see it uses a little less than 50 %.
> Question: am I correct if interpreting that the 64 bit application uses
> both CPU's, and that the 32 bits uses one CPU?
> Thank you.
> Paul Casman
>

Paul
Mon Mar 24 00:40:27 PDT 2008

I followed your advice, and switched TM to one graph per CPU. Both
applications (64-bits 7zip and 32-bits VisualStudio) use both CPU's.
I learned something thanks to you, and are grateful for that.
Paul Casman