stephenbrooks.orgForumMuon1GeneralBest Operating System for DPAD...?
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JSA2
2004-10-12 12:40:55
I've noticed a thread or two pertaining to speed differences betweem Win 2000 Pro and Win XP Pro when running DPAD, but without much info or followup.

I have yet to try both Operating systems on the same hardware to determine wether this is the case and I was curious if anyone has.

I'm going to be benchmarking a multitude of dual and quad processor machines and before I start I would like to know if its a valid point to go thru installing each os and then benchmarking DPAD, unless no-one has determined whether this is an issue or not.

Your thoughts and opinions would be greatly appreciated.
UnderTitan
2004-10-13 20:51:17
JSA2, did you finish that comparison yet?  I'm running XP Pro, and if there is better performance, I'd like to know about it before I build my new muon crunchers.  Please keep us posted.

If anyone else has an opinion, please share your input.

Thanks.
JSA2
2004-10-13 23:24:51
Okay Everyone....

The initial results so far show NO measurable improvement between Windows 2000 Pro and Windows XP Pro.

The benchmark results for both operating systems showed about a +/-.25 Mpt/s variation on the same hardware.

One of the earlier posts I've seen someone state that they switched from Win2000 to XP and saw a 100% increase in speed, which is what drove me to verify if this was true....but so far I'm suspecting his performance increase was more based along the lines of drivers or a possible problem with ad-ware / spyware on his original install of Win2000.

I am going to try this on one other unit before I make any concrete announcements.

After I finish this experiment I will be posting some benchmarks I've been collating from some of my personal units.  Here are some initial numbers if anyone is interested.....

Compaq SP700 Professional Workstation - Dual P2-450 XEON / 512K Cache / 100FSB : 64.00 Kpt/s
Compaq Proliant 1600 - Dual P3-550 / 512K Cache / 100FSB : Still Testing
Dual P3-550 BX Chipset / 512K Cache / 100FSB : 75.00 Kpt/s
Dual P3-550 GX Chipset / 512K Cache / 100FSB : 76.00 Kpt/s
SGI Professional Graphics Workstation - Dual P3-733 XEON / 256K Cache / 133FSB : Still Testing
Dual 2.667 XEON w/HT E7505 / 512K Cache / 533FSB : Still Testing
AMD Athlon XP 2600+ SIS / DDR 333 / 166FSB : 225.00 Kpt/s


Please reply with any thoughts.....
UnderTitan
2004-10-14 00:20:33
JSA2,

Thanks for posting that info.  I'm curious.  What board are you using with your XP2600+, and is it overclocked? 

Have you ran Super Pi on your 2600? 

The OverclockersClub.com Members Postings are pretty interesting. 
They say that this test shows raw cpu power...

Here is the Super Pi download link and the Download page, in case you don't want to click on a blind link.

I'd be interested to see what other's performance would be.  Seems like the 1M (1 million digits) is the standard unit to compare, since there isn't really a benchmark with this software.  I have an older celereon 866, and did 3m 24s... so I'm definately looking to get a better system.

I'd like to see what results you get with your athlon... if you don't mind.

Thanks.
HaloJones
2004-10-14 01:48:15
I have an Athlon XP runnig at 2.4GHz which does SuperPi 1M in 42 seconds.  Your Celeron could do with an upgrade Wink
kitsura
2004-10-14 07:37:22
P3-550 BX Chipset, wow!  And I thought my P3 1GHz 815 chipset was old.
UnderTitan
2004-10-14 10:09:01
I actually have the oldest computer in the house.  My wife has an athlon xp 1800, that does SuperPi in about 1 minute 20 seconds or so.  I had muon1 running there, but she thinks it causes problems when she's using the computer, so insists that I not run it..... headache....

I mentioned earlier that I'm in the process of building 3 machines.  Not sure of the motherboard yet, but plan to use athlon mobile 2600 and overclock.  Looking at the results that Stephen has posted, in the "Benchmarking with Mpts thread"
the athlon's seem to be getting higher pts/Mclock.  Besides, with building several machines it's a little cheaper.  I want to do it now, but have a hard time convincing my wife(never thought I'd say that) that I can spend the money.  another headache....
UnderTitan
2004-10-16 04:30:32
Any news JSA2?
Stephen Brooks
2004-10-16 08:49:10
quote:
Originally posted by UnderTitan:
My wife has an athlon xp 1800, that does SuperPi in about 1 minute 20 seconds or so.  I had muon1 running there, but she thinks it causes problems when she's using the computer, so insists that I not run it..... headache....
You could put it on background mode on startup and unless she looks in Task Manager she won't notice Big Grin I've got a P-II-400 here and just had to do a Ctrl-Alt-Del just to figure out if Muon1 was actually running or not...

I installed it on another machine at work but its Linux install is screwed (hangs the machine) and as the bootloader is in Linux that means I can't get at the grub.conf file to change the default bootup to Windows so that if it's switched on it'll go into the OS with Muon1 installed.
UnderTitan
2004-10-16 09:25:39
I tried that.  She lives on her computer, and if anything's different, then I'm automatically guilty of doing something to it.  Wink She knows how to figure things out.  That's why I'm going to just build some custom crunchers.
Stephen Brooks
2004-10-16 13:48:25
Note to self: research possibility of totally-invisible Muon1 client
spldart
2004-10-16 16:36:35
quote:
Originally posted by Stephen Brooks:
_Note to self: research possibility of totally-invisible Muon1 client_


WOOOT!  Big Grin
kitsura
2004-10-16 22:07:21
That would be scary a process that doesn't even show up in the task manager.  Is it even possible?
BOHICASETI
2004-10-16 23:31:08
Maybe have something in the config.txt that lets you change the process name listed in the taskmanager to anything you like.  Something like . . .

ProcessName=Calculator
or
ProcessName=SystemLogon Roll Eyes
Nexus
2004-10-17 02:25:02
[ethics pedant]Hmmmm.  I'm not so sure scabbing processing power from someone else without their knowledge is the "done thing". Regardless of how irrational their objections are, it's their computer and they have the right to decide what goes on there and what doesn't.[/ethics pedant]

BOHICASETI, I wonder if simply renaming the muon1.exe file will do what you want and save you stuffing about with config.
Nexus
2004-10-17 03:04:36
quote:
Originally posted by kitsura:
That would be scary a process that doesn't even show up in the task manager.  Is it even possible? 


It is.  Several very damaging and irritating forms of spyware/malware can do it. 

Now this is a topic I feel quite strongly about (the people who write this stuff are the scum of the earth and need to be stopped), so I'm warning you now that this is going to be a long ranty post filled with a lot of griping and some very good advice.  If you're not too sure if you're protected against malware or even what it is you probably need to struggle through it.  Otherwise just shrug me off as a well-meaning windbag.


There's a lot of nasty software floating around on the internet these days.  Not just viruses, but programs that escpe your virus checkers because they're not viruses in the traditional sense.  These programs range from spyware (programs that track some or all of your internet activities) to malware, which deliberately causes harm to your system.  The horrendous CoolWebSearch, which hijacks your browser and forces you to go to their dodgy search engine and a horde of porn sites, is a good example of this.

To be effective, these programs need to be fairly unobtrusive.  They should not be easily seen in Task Manager, so they could either have a name that looks like a system process or not show up at all. 

Fortunately, you can protect yourself.  There are a number of good free programs out there that can rid your machine of these pests.  I'll detail the good ones; the ones I use.

Spybot Search & Destroy - This is the best of the best.  Created and maintained by a bunch of philanthropic computer geeks working non-profit, this program can remove over 20,000 different kinds of crap from your computer and give you permanent immunization against almost 2000 of them.  Get it, you must.

AdAware - This is another fine program.  It's much the same as Spybot (minus the immunizations) but it catches a few things Spybot misses, and vice versa.

Spyware Blaster- This one's a little different to the other two.  It removes nothing, but it gives your system immunity from 4,000 pests. 

HijackThis- Another very fine piece of software.  This one is devoted to stomping hijackers, which are more malicious and clever than mere spyware.  It's a lifesaver.  Also on this site are a number of other programs that I find useful.

Lastly, I urge you to keep up to date with your Windows updates.  Microsoft have created an opperating system riddled with security holes but to their credit they are constantly at work writing patches to, well, patch it up.

I'm sorry if I bored you with this long rant but it is something I care about.  If my ramblings make people more aware of the disgusting things these scumbags put onto the web, then it's well worth boring the people who do know about it.  And I'll say this: I wish someone had taken the time to tell me what was going on when I was struggling with an infested second-hand computer.
Stephen Brooks
2004-10-17 04:56:48
I use AdAware sometimes, though it seems I don't have a tendancy to catch much in the way of malware (probably because of the sort of sites I don't go to and the fact I know the difference between an executable file and my foot).  Something called 'Gator' appeared when I installed {MSN, I think} but AdAware got rid of that.

To be honest, the OS shouldn't allow processes to run without appearing in some sort of task manager.  Services are a bit odd on networked machines - for instance at work I have a load that I can't shut down because they're services.  But some people have already figured out ways to run Muon1 as a service if you want to do that to all your LAN computers.

My suggestion about an invisible client was mostly a joke (I'd probably not get around to making it work even if I was serious), though I thought it would be an interesting scientific test to see if his wife was imagining things when she said Muon1 caused computer problems!  My mum sometimes insists that the computer isn't working "because of that new button on the taskbar*" or "because you rearranged the folders" when in fact it's something completely unrelated she is doing wrong.

[* She won't call it 'taskbar', obviously.  More likely "down there" or "on that windows bar thing" Razz ]
ZeRoCooL
2004-10-17 05:30:39
Just add a pause if tasmanager.exe is running in your program.  Then your cpu is not running on 100% !
Stephen Brooks
2004-10-17 05:31:57
quote:
Originally posted by Nexus:
[ethics pedant]Hmmmm.  I'm not so sure scabbing processing power from someone else without their knowledge is the "done thing".

Talking of ethics:
quote:
oh well, better than experimenting with particle accelerators which could possibly produce anti matter/black hole and destroy the earth and the entire universe. 

http://bt-gm.com/boards/index.php?showtopic=238&view=findpost&p=1012
kitsura
2004-10-17 05:43:26
I know lots about spyware as I frequently have to troubleshoot friends PC and get rid of them.  Take coolwebsearch or some other irritating undying spyware for example.  They will embed themselves into several of your obscure OS startup locations that you didn't knew were possible to autostart from.  They have registry files, batch files in your windows startup folder.  System services (which do show up but you probably don't know what they are) that are set to restart once stopped.  ActiveX entries that start with your IE browser.  So if just anyone of them get discovered and deleted the other will help 'resurrect' their defeated counterpart.  That's why you see why some people advise you to format your PC to get rid of all these spyware.

If only Windows were _this_ hard to take down.  Razz

P.S. I still doubt the existance of background processes that don't show up in the task manager.  But I didn't learn Windows programming so I don't really know.  Stephen any comments?
Stephen Brooks
2004-10-18 03:29:09
No idea, but I guess spyware cloaking itself as a thread inside another process is sufficient.  Services show up in some places but not others.
K`Tetch
2004-10-22 13:23:38
quote:
One of the earlier posts I've seen someone state that they switched from Win2000 to XP and saw a 100% increase in speed, which is what drove me to verify if this was true....but so far I'm suspecting his performance increase was more based along the lines of drivers or a possible problem with ad-ware / spyware on his original install of Win2000.


That Might have been me.  for some reason, I was getting kernal times in the region of 40-50% constantly.  switched to 2k, and it droped to 1-2%.

quote:
That would be scary a process that doesn't even show up in the task manager.  Is it even possible? 


It was an option in the old rc5-64 distributed.net clients (from before they lost their way, and their ability to regurgitate the same crap)

quote:
Talking of ethics:...

Glad to see you get a chuckle from that thread

Persoanlly, I don't care one way or another.  I see hiding the client's process as a nice way to ensure people don't kill it beause they don't knoww hat it is, meaning to do good.  A secondary way to kill the client might be a idea then.  something like a check every minute for the existance of the file "muon1kill.txt" in the directory.  This method was how i used to give my system 2 hours of downtime' every night, by using .bat's triggered off the system scheduler to move the file in and out of the directory.  a move, to get the file in, a move to get it out 2 hours latr, and then a call to the main exe, worked like a charm.
UnderTitan
2004-12-28 21:38:28
So what was the conclusion?  Was there a BEST OS for muon1?  I'd like to get a final word. 

Is there any reason the XP or 2000 would run faster than 98, anyone?

Please advise.

Thanks
JSA2
2004-12-30 06:56:19
So far from my benchmarks there is really no difference...xp seems to be a "smidgen" faster than 2k, but not more than 2-3 mpts an hour.
UnderTitan
2004-12-30 22:56:32
Is anyone running muon1 with WINE under Linux?  I don't have a linux box running, but would like to consider the option.  Does anyone have recent feedback?  The other linux stuff in the forum is a little dated.

Thanks.
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