Performance with 64bit

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SergioBigRed
Posts: 25
Joined: Fri Jun 08, 2012 9:40 am

Performance with 64bit

Post by SergioBigRed »

Hi Guys,

I am a long time user of PMS and then UMS to stream content from my Pc to my Ps3.

I have an Intel dual core 3ghz, 4Gb ram (DDR2 - 1066 OC), asus ASUS P5QL-EM , some Sata Disks (a brand new 3Tb from WD just installed) and gigabit ethernet to the PS3.

I had XP since the beginning, and I never had any issue from streaming 1080p DTS content to my PS3 from a cpu resources point of view, only problem I had when I set compression to minimum and I saturated the ethernet connection with over 300mb/s of streaming (keyint=25:vqscale=2:vqmin=1).

I do a lot of transcoding because being Italian I watch movies in English with subtitles ;-)

To squeeze a little bit more from my system I moved yesterday to Win7 Ultimate 64bit. Now I have all my previous setup with Java 7 (again 64bit), but with some movies (Pixar Presto DTS 1080p is my benchmark) and when I FF to 1.5x I see some stuttering due to CPU 100%...

I reinstalled UMS from scratch and replicated the previous XP setup in terms of parameters of decoding.

I currently solved this stuttering putting the Java process to "High priority" in Task Manager, but I hoped that a complete switch to 64bit would have improved performances... No other processes requesting CPU resources are appearing right now (Win7 installation is clean)

Any hint here? Is there a 64bit Mencoder I can use with UMS? Or should I move back to 32bit (losing some memory from the 4gb I have)?

Thanks

Sergio
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SubJunk
Lead Developer
Posts: 3705
Joined: Sun May 27, 2012 4:12 pm

Re: Performance with 64bit

Post by SubJunk »

UMS does not use 64-bit in any way, but having said that I think that usually 32-bit programs run a bit faster on a 64-bit operating system anyway. Not much faster but a little. So I recommend staying with it :)

You can improve compression without quality loss by changing the vqmin in the MPEG-2 options to 2. Using 1 is not recommended and 2 gives the same visible quality.
You can improve CPU speed by using keyint=5 instead of 25.
SergioBigRed
Posts: 25
Joined: Fri Jun 08, 2012 9:40 am

Re: Performance with 64bit

Post by SergioBigRed »

SubJunk wrote:UMS does not use 64-bit in any way, but having said that I think that usually 32-bit programs run a bit faster on a 64-bit operating system anyway. Not much faster but a little. So I recommend staying with it :)

You can improve compression without quality loss by changing the vqmin in the MPEG-2 options to 2. Using 1 is not recommended and 2 gives the same visible quality.
You can improve CPU speed by using keyint=5 instead of 25.
Hello Subjunk thanks for the feedback!

Am I wrong here or did I saw in the past a 64bit of PMS??? :roll:

However, I will try to set the MPEG values as you you suggest and put Java 32bit instead and test again

I will also try to speed up my HTPC overclocking ram! 8-)

Ciao,

SergioBigRed
ExSport
Posts: 595
Joined: Wed Oct 10, 2012 1:57 am

Re: Performance with 64bit

Post by ExSport »

There is no 64bit support of UMS or PMS. Only mandatory is version of JAVA you are using.
When you will use 64bit JAVA, you can grant more memory for PMS/UMS.
E.g. using 2-3 renderers on 32bit system with 400MB buffer size leads to crash sometimes because also with 16GB of RAM in 32bit system, JAVA can't use bigger heap size around to 1200-1400 MB.
In default installation the value is 768MB so almost every system with 1GB and more are able to create so big heap size.
In other words, JAVA 64bit is recommended but you can't expect any speed improvements ;)
DevlshOne
Posts: 25
Joined: Tue Oct 23, 2012 6:01 am
Location: Georgia

Re: Performance with 64bit

Post by DevlshOne »

ExSport wrote:In other words, JAVA 64bit is recommended but you can't expect any speed improvements ;)
Confirmed! Although x64 JAVA let's you allocate more memory to the heap stack, it's the CPU that's doing all the work. I'm going to upgrade my WHS2011 box from a 2.8GHz Athlon to a 3.2GHz Phenom II x4 and see how much that helps.
Server: WHS 2011 - AMD Athlon 2.8GHz {Black Edition} - 4GB PC2-6400 - 7TB
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