Performance Down

[darenu]

OK, I appeal to the community for advice.

I am not getting the performance I used to out of VT[2]. When I first set it up (December 2001, wow) I was getting about 5 layers of alpha'd RTV's in real time in TeD. No rendering, no stuttering.

For the past few months I've not been able to even get 3 layers real time. I do a lot of production with a main video layer in the back, an alpha channel border (Jumpback cut up in After Effects, and rendered as RTV+Alpha), and foreground animated graphics with alpha. I can't even play 3 seconds of this anymore without drops and stutters.

I have done everything you would normally think to do. Defrag'd video drives, even re-formatted them. I finally broke down today and wiped out my system drive and reinstalled Windows 2000 on a freshly formatted drive. After the few hours of doing this, I got the same disappointing results performance-wise.

My system is as follows:
Dual Xeon 1.7Ghz
512Mb
Supermicro Board
60Gb 7200RPM System drive
4x 73Gb 10k Cheetahs, RAID on 2 channels of motherboard's u160
Windows 2000 sp3, all updates installed
VT 3890

As of today's re-install, nothing but the VT[2] is even installed on the machine.

Autoconfig still shows 141Mb/Sec on the RAID

The Task Manager shows that the CPU's are only hitting a max of 25% when trying 3 layers, so it must some type of drive through-put issue??

Help, anyone. Those of you with similar config's, are you getting 5+ layers? I remember the days when I did, and I just can't get back there.

[SBowie]

Hmmmm. I imagine it's safe to assume you have turned drive indexing off for the video volume? And you haven't added any CD or DVD burning package that inadvertently installed packet burning software?

I've always found that anything with an alpha channel has a significant impact, and you're running several in your example, but I guess you could do this before? Are you able to run 5 layers (simply as 4 PIPs over an RTV background) when an alpha is not involved?

[darenu]

Yes indexing is off, and now CD burning.

I was able to get 3-5 layers very consistently before with alpha.

What I'm finding right now, running benchmark software on the RAID, is that I'm getting EXTREMELY inconsistent performance from the array. Running benchmark software (not the VT autoconfig) I get 60Mb/s one time, 125 the next, then 80, etc. What's more disturbing is that 75% of the time I get "minimum" write speeds of only 500k/s. I think the SCSI adapter or bus is having trouble communicating with the array. Since it's motherboard-based (P4DC6+), it's a little hard to swap it out and try a different card, but I might have to.

Anyone else have these inconsistencies?

[MGuerra]

EXTREMELY inconsistent performance from the array

Sounds like one of your drives may be dying.

[darenu]

That's the sense I get :(

Is there a way to test. How would I know which one?

I did get a minor error the first time I re-formatted the array last night.

[wvp]

I believe the way you would test a drive would be to unplug it from the array. You might have to "re-stripe" the array then and this may mean losing the data on the drives :( - but I am not a tech expert, so this may be completely off base.
Another thought worth mentioning (Cause it only takes a second to check this) is what are your preferences set at?
TED CACHE should probably be set at something like 80mb/sec, maybe more depending on your drives. This setting has a direct relation to how many layers you can edit without background rendering.
TED CPU should be set to your processor speed (1.7x2=3.4)
Be aware that there are issues with DirectX version 9 & 3890.
CD/DVD buring software is fine as long as you don't install the packet burning components (eg. Roxio's Direct CD).

[darenu]

Actually, I found Seagate's diagnostic software ( www.seagate.com/support/seatools ) . I ran the "quick" diagnostic and all drives passed, but the extensive diagnostic reported a failure on my drive 3.

I've not lost data, but it appears that this is probably the problem.