Is L4 more CPU or Hard drive intensive?

Hope this makes sense.

When running searches, opening resources, linking, and doing all the famous things Logos allows, can you tell from your particular task manager whether Logos 4 is more CPU intensive, or hard drive intensive? Does the CPU tend to register more activity when you are using Logos 4 (I mean more activity by jumping way up in CPU usage when doing things in Logos 4), or the hard drive? I know that it must be saving your locations, layouts, etc... while you type things somewhere on the hard drive.

Thanks for the help.

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George Allakhverdyan

Hope this makes sense.

When running searches, opening resources, linking, and doing all the famous things Logos allows, can you tell from your particular task manager whether Logos 4 is more CPU intensive, or hard drive intensive? Does the CPU tend to register more activity when you are using Logos 4 (I mean more activity by jumping way up in CPU usage when doing things in Logos 4), or the hard drive? I know that it must be saving your locations, layouts, etc... while you type things somewhere on the hard drive.

Thanks for the help.

I would say more CPU intensive. Dual/Quad-core processors perform much better especially during indexing.

Anthony Etienne

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/64754#Comment_64754

I've noticed that the only time all 4 of my cpu cores are above 50% usage is during indexing. When using the application nothing significant cpu wise other then searches and then only 1 cpu might be pegged for a 1/2 second or so. Hardrive light is hardly on, except on startup, indexing and when downloading updates etc. I've notice that the program will use as little as 128MB of memory and grow, dynamically to 700MB (the highest I've noticed so far, could go higher). I have 8GB RAM on windows 7 64bit, I'm sure everything is being handled in memory after startup, and then being cached and written to disk after a period of time. Which is probably why I'm not seeing any performance problems or lengthy hard disk activity other then stated above.

Now if this was my older Pentium IV 3.2 1GB machine I would probably see a lot more hard disk activity (significant page file use) and probably average 50% or higher continuous cpu activity

Doug

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/64768#Comment_64768

Hey Anthony, what kind of quad-core are you running on? I'm getting ready to buy an i5 with 4GB ram and way wondering what kind of performance improvements I can expect over my 2.2GHz AMD Turion 64 X2 Ultra with 3Gb ram? Also, how is your notes performance? Do you use them much and do they keep up with your typing?

Phil Gons (Logos)

You might be interested in this: Better Video Cards Do Make a Difference.

I'm not sure how to rank CPU, RAM, GPU, and drive (hard or solid state) in terms of performance benefits.

Anthony Etienne

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/64862#Comment_64862

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 @ 2.50

My notes performance keeps up with my typing (just tested it while typing at my peak 55wpm) No lag or anything like that, and I have a ton of tabs and external windows open within Logos 4 as well as other apps. I'm running windows 7 64bit with 8GB ram

Anthony Etienne

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/64926#Comment_64926

Oh yeah and I have a ATI 4650HD 1GB video card as well which really helps when intergrated with the other hardware I mentioned

Pat Flanakin

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/64934#Comment_64934

Ok, in observing task manager in VM for my Mac, the CPU goes to 100% when opening my multiple tab layout for Bible study with Hebrew and Greek resources open as well, but this goes to zero at the point everything is open.

My notes keeps up find with my typing and is responsive. I think that I will just keep things how they are until the Mac version is running to speed with all the Windows' bells and whistles needed for functionality.

Glenn F

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/64862#Comment_64862

I'm getting ready to buy an i5 with 4GB ram and way wondering what kind of performance improvements I can expect over my 2.2GHz AMD Turion 64 X2 Ultra with 3Gb ram?

Unless you are overly concerned about battery life if you are looking at a laptop I would suggest you go with the i7. I'm not 100% sure but I don't think the i5's take advantage of hyperthreading. I have a i7 720QM and it works wonders with Logos. Just a quick word to say you might want to investigate the i5 Vs. the i7.

Pat Flanakin

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/65642#Comment_65642

In terms of quad core machines, if you are partial to laptops, then I would suggest waiting another year or two and MB Pros will be out with quad cores. At this point, I have close to the best they have and it does well with a 2.93 dual core and 8GB RAM; however, even running Logos 4 through a VM on Win XP SP3, it is not as rabbit fast as L3 was. I had been contemplating purchasing a barebones Win 7 upgrade just for L4, but at this point, I think when L4 for Mac is up to snuff, that is a free out for me since Logos is nice enough not to charge separately for different platforms of L4 (i.e. Win or Mac).

Until then, I will live with VM3 and Win XP. It does work and Notes's typing keeps up with my pace sufficiently.

Keith Larson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/65803#Comment_65803

I have been doing so tweaking on various systems and the one thing that is very clear to me is address your weak point first. In other words, L4 uses the whole system and just throwing in a faster CPU or HDD will not help if you video card is the bottle neck. For example, I have one desktop with a dual core AMD running at 2.7 MHz and a ATI HD 3870 video card and it does everything faster in Logos, except indexing, than my AMD Quad core running at 2.3 MHz and a cheap ATI HD 3400 video card. In other words, if I want to make my Quad core system faster for L4 I should put my money into a new video card, not a new CPU.

As for memory, I just got a new laptop with 8GB of memory and I really can't see it making any difference vs. these two desktops with 4GB memory. My old laptop only had 2GB memory and on this system I did notice memory becoming a bottleneck. Thus I would say that 3-4GB of memory is the sweet spot right now.

Now as to HDD, that AMD Quad Core that I talked about also had a very slow HDD when L4 first came out. It was a Seagate with only a 8MB cache. I now have a Western Digital Black edition with two 32MB caches and L4 runs much better.

A good tool to see where you bottlenecks might be in Vista and Win7 is the Windows Experience Index. For example in the Quad Core system I was talking out, my score is as follows:

As you can see the bottleneck is the video card.

Pat Flanakin

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/65836#Comment_65836

I have a NVIDIA 9600 GT video card in the MB Pro. I assume that is a strong video card.

Keith Larson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/65840#Comment_65840

Look like a good card to me. http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_m_series.html

Pat Flanakin

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/65867#Comment_65867

Yeah, its okay, but now that I see the ones which are stronger, I wish Apple would have put more into its Vid cards.

Alan Head

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/65901#Comment_65901

Hi, I think right now that, ultimately, L4 is code-limited, either by Microsoft's frameworks or by Logo's new codebase. I have a i7 920 @4.4 GHz and plenty of fast RAM. I tried installing L4 on my SSD, my 10K rpm hdd, and on a new Barracuda, and the speed wasn't all that different on each. L4 was still quite sluggish.

Therefore, I'm thinking that wait states, loops, etc. are much of what is slowing down L4. If you think about it, L4 is quite a bear to write and maintain. What other program is so intensive with hashing, db, AND graphics? I don't know any. Most db frontends are as graphics intensive, and I would think (though I don't know for sure) that most graphics-intensive apps don't do so much with databases.

Anyway, if I were coding something so new I would probably be very careful to insert places to catch bugs, check data from other branches in the program, etc. I would imagine as more and more bugs get squashed and the appdev team gets more confident in the internal data passing then they will optimize the code much more for speed.

Just my $0.02.

Doug

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/66172#Comment_66172

I have decided to go with an i7 860 processor, 4GB of 1600MHz DDR3, I have over a TB of SATA drives @ 7200 rpm, Gforce 9500 graphics with 1GB of ram, and an Intel P55WB motherboard. It will have to last me a while so I decided to take advantage of the hyper-threading since it was only $50 more. I'm $50 mored out now though. I appreciate all the advice you guys have offered. Keith, you have been a big help to me in making my decision. If you hadn't have chimed in, I would have made a mistake. Thanks much (my wife says I owe her big-time though).

Rob Lindemann

This is a point of concern for me as well. In particular, I am especially concerned about excessive hard drive usage. I do like L4 a lot but I also think it's a really "busy" program, i.e. lots of syncing, especially if you have several resources/tabs open and the "use internet" option on in the program settings. This tends to result in a lack of smoothness in scrolling windows and some delay in switching tabs. I often notice that the syncronization icon is active, along with accompanying hard drive activity, but I'm not sure what it's syncing. One solution is to turn off the "use internet" setting which seems to reduce the frequent syncronization and hard drive activity.

Which brings up another concern: I find L4 to undercommunicate to the user as well. For example, what is it syncronizing with over the internet? It appears to syncronize with the online sermon resources according to whatever passage of scripture you are studying. In addition, why don't we get further descriptions about the hundres of megabytes of updates that it downloads every week or so? One thing I'm guessing with this is that it's replacing old L3 resource file formats with updated L4 files.

I had real concerns over system requirements when my first L4 install had terrible performance issues, e.g., lot's of jarring, delays, freezing up, etc. This install was downloaded completely over the internet so I uninstalled it and ordered a DVD. I tried another install with that and the performance was much better! If anyone is noticing some CPU or hard drive performance issues with an online install, you may want to consider reinstalling with DVD media instead.

Bill Cook

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/66341#Comment_66341

Wow! that sounds sufficient.

BTW, from above i5's are quad-core as are i7's, but the i5 does indeed not support hyper threading as suspected. So, the i7 has four cores and 8 threads, where the i5 has 4 cores and 4 threads. The i7 also supports QPI (Quick Path Interconnect) which is supposed to mean that each core has its own memory controller to further speed parallel processing. So, things should be fast... zoom, zoom in Windows.

But still, I wonder how much performance boost L4 will be noticed.

Douglas: please report back when you have L4 up and runing on your new 'chine.

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/65836#Comment_65836

I have been doing so tweaking on various systems and the one thing that is very clear to me is address your weak point first. In other words, L4 uses the whole system and just throwing in a faster CPU or HDD will not help if you video card is the bottle neck. For example, I have one desktop with a dual core AMD running at 2.7 MHz and a ATI HD 3870 video card and it does everything faster in Logos, except indexing, than my AMD Quad core running at 2.3 MHz and a cheap ATI HD 3400 video card. In other words, if I want to make my Quad core system faster for L4 I should put my money into a new video card, not a new CPU.

If L4 doesn't utilise more than 2 cores in normal operation then I would expect a faster clocked dual core processor to outperform a quad core, which is what you are reporting. It is also to be expected that a quad core will outperform a dual core if 4 cores can be utilised! So if you want to improve the quad core system for L4 you need a faster processor! If HDD and memory are optimal (as you report) I wouldn't expect a faster video card to compensate for a slow processor.

Keith Larson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/66382#Comment_66382

If L4 doesn't utilise more than 2 cores in normal operation then I would expect a faster clocked dual core processor to outperform a quad core, which is what you are reporting. It is also to be expected that a quad core will outperform a dual core if 4 cores can be utilised! So if you want to improve the quad core system for L4 you need a faster processor! If HDD and memory are optimal (as you report) I wouldn't expect a faster video card to compensate for a slow processor

You are correct in stating that the faster dual core will make for a faster system when L4 is not using more than 2 cores. However, the reason I suspect it is the video card that is making the most difference is this system populates right click boxes, drop down menus, reports, and the like faster than the quad core with the slower video card, this gives it the "feel" of being faster.

Mark Barnes

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/66354#Comment_66354

For example, what is it syncronizing with over the internet? It appears to syncronize with the online sermon resources according to whatever passage of scripture you are studying.

I regularly monitor Logos 4's syncing, and it's doing nothing untoward. As well as obvious things notes and settings, it spends a lot of its time syncing things like the last open place in every resource.

In addition, why don't we get further descriptions about the hundres of megabytes of updates that it downloads every week or so? One thing I'm guessing with this is that it's replacing old L3 resource file formats with updated L4 files.

You're right, we ought to get this information direct from Logos. However, users on the forum normally come up with a list of updated resources within a few hours of the update being released. The last lot of updates were corrections to the reverse interlinears, for example.

If anyone is noticing some CPU or hard drive performance issues with an online install, you may want to consider reinstalling with DVD media instead.

The installation location shouldn't make a difference, unless your download gets corrupted (which does occasionally happen). It's more likely that when you installed for the second time, you installed a more recent version of the software. Logos 4 has improved fairly significantly in performance since release.

Michael Birney

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/66663#Comment_66663

Just my observations. L4 pegs (uses 100%) of my dual core cpu often. It also has 4 gb memory, and it never pegs the memory. Also have fast 500 mb video card - I think this might slow L4 down.

L4 never pegs my quad core, and it has 8gb of memory, I don't think I've ever seen it over 45%. This is a gaming computer, video card has 1gb memory.

If I was upgrading:

If I was using built in video card, I'd install a new one first, I'd get a 1gb one.

I would go with processor next, a much faster dual core - if you go from 1.8 to 2.2 then that might be worth paying for. If you go from dual to quad core this requires changing out a mother board, so now cost is prohibitive.

Next memory.

If I already had a good video card (at least 250 mb) then I'd wait until this point to upgrade it to 1gb.

Lastly, faster hard drives.

Keith Larson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/67386#Comment_67386

I would go with processor next, a much faster dual core - if you go from 1.8 to 2.2 then that might be worth paying for. If you go from dual to quad core this requires changing out a mother board, so now cost is prohibitive.

Not if you are using AMD. This is the one area that AMD really excels. When the new 6 core AMD chips come out they can go into the same motherboard that I now have a dual core in.

Doug

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/66360#Comment_66360

Douglas: please report back when you have L4 up and runing on your new 'chine.

Will do. I expect to have my parts in next Wednesday. I should have my system together by Thursday and hopefully have L4 up and running by Saturday. I'll give you all an update when I get it up and going.