|
|
|
|
| Author |
Message |
Richard
Guest
|
 Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 5:42 am Post subject: Tyan S2895 unhappiness |
 |
|
It's been just over a year now that I had this very expensive computer
built for me and frankly it has been very disappointing.
The board is fitted with a pair of dual core Opterons, 6G of ram, four
of the fastest Seagate SCSI drives, and a pair of Raptors in a raid 0
configuration to provide a scratch disk for Photoshop CS.
This computer was built to just run Photoshop as fast as possible, but
it has not lived up to expectations. It is a dual boot with XPPro32 and
64. I generally run it in 64 bit mode. I find that when doing tasks,
it often simply seems to stop running Photoshop and two entries then
appear in the task manager window showing both 'not responding' If one
waits some minutes the situation will generally correct itself. Very
frustrating when one has a deadline to meet.
I am also experiencing instances of warning of a failed write, and this
sometimes happens when saying a file. There is then nothing to be done
but to close down and loose ones work. Sometimes the only way out is
to simply turn off the power. I often find that when closing down
after a session that it will not close down after getting to the closing
down screen.
The computer has been back to the builders but they cannot find anything
wrong with it.
Any help would be very much appreciated.
Many thanks
--
Richard |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
|
|
Richard
Guest
|
| Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 5:57 am Post subject: Re: Tyan S2895 unhappiness |
|
|
In his posting of Sun, 28 Jan 2007, Richard writes
| Quote: | It's been just over a year now that I had this very expensive computer
built for me and frankly it has been very disappointing.
|
Just as a follow-up. I'm using the on board SCSI. Photoshop is being
used with no added plug in filters and no additional fonts, so it should
have every chance to perform well. No other applications are running
when PS is working.
Thanks if you can help me.
Cheers
--
Richard |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Paul
Guest
|
| Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 11:45 am Post subject: Re: Tyan S2895 unhappiness |
|
|
Richard wrote:
| Quote: | It's been just over a year now that I had this very expensive computer
built for me and frankly it has been very disappointing.
The board is fitted with a pair of dual core Opterons, 6G of ram, four
of the fastest Seagate SCSI drives, and a pair of Raptors in a raid 0
configuration to provide a scratch disk for Photoshop CS.
This computer was built to just run Photoshop as fast as possible, but
it has not lived up to expectations. It is a dual boot with XPPro32 and
64. I generally run it in 64 bit mode. I find that when doing tasks,
it often simply seems to stop running Photoshop and two entries then
appear in the task manager window showing both 'not responding' If one
waits some minutes the situation will generally correct itself. Very
frustrating when one has a deadline to meet.
I am also experiencing instances of warning of a failed write, and this
sometimes happens when saying a file. There is then nothing to be done
but to close down and loose ones work. Sometimes the only way out is
to simply turn off the power. I often find that when closing down
after a session that it will not close down after getting to the closing
down screen.
The computer has been back to the builders but they cannot find anything
wrong with it.
Any help would be very much appreciated.
Many thanks
|
Can you reproduce the problems on demand ? If you could, then you could
give your builders a demonstration. And then they couldn't claim there
was nothing wrong. A second thing that would help, is recording exact
error messages, collect evidence from the Event Viewer (where the
errors may also be logged).
A dual socket system is certainly more complicated, so you pay for
the performance, with a machine that takes more effort to operate.
And I suspect you've already learned a lot about operating your
machine, so I'll be repeating things you already know. Note that
the following has nothing to do with your error conditions, but
is just for performance tuning.
1) Have you installed Dual Core Optimizer ? This may not make any
difference to you, but you should investigate why it is necessary.
At this point, I don't know how many cores you have on the box.
And I'm not a dual socket expert, so I don't know under what
conditions this should be used. The second link is an (unnecessarily)
long thread about optimizing Athlon64 systems with more than one
core - it has been some time since I've read it.
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871_9706,00.html
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=81429&page=23
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896256/en-us
2) Do you know what "affinity" is in a multi core environment ? That
is for forcing an application to stay on one core. Some applications
only play nice, when you hit them with a hammer. So far, I've never
seen affinity and Photoshop used in the same breath, so knowing
about affinity may be more applicable to other applications you're
using.
3) In terms of RAM configuration, I'd be investigating what memory config
allows the fastest timing and clock to be used on the RAM. On Athlon64
systems with unbuffered memory, this would be two sticks per processor
socket. This allows DDR400 rate to be used, and Command Rate 1T setting,
for best memory bandwidth. Registered systems may be different, in terms
of being adversely affected by four sticks per socket. I don't know
if you use Command Rate 2T with four registered sticks or not.
You might also want to read this article, which discusses various
interleaving options. At least one interleaving option should be
disabled for best performance.
http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/cpu/rmma-numa.html
In terms of places I'd go looking for help (either passively or
actively) are:
http://forums.2cpu.com (This one is populated by people who use dual
socket motherboards. To use the search engine,
you have to register. They also use fancy storage
subsystems, so RAID questions are also a reason
to visit there.)
http://www.k8we.com (I discovered this one, from reading 2cpu.com.
I don't know if there is anything of value here
or not. The threads I see there now, seem to
involve slapping 8800 video cards on your
motherboard.)
http://www.adobeforums.com (I don't understand how this forum works, but
at least you'll find some Photoshop users here.)
As for your problems, everyone has their own favorite approach to
problem solving. If I was a Photoshop user, being paid for the jobs I can
complete, then my first priority would be building an environment,
any environment, that works. Playing with more exotic setups, I'd leave
for the weekend. So, in your shoes, I'd be looking for a RAM configuration,
OS choice, which doesn't piss off the I/O devices. To me that implies:
1) Drop down to 4GB total RAM. 2x1GB per processor.
2) Disable memory hole.
3) Use WinXP 32 bit edition. With luck, Photoshop gets 3GB max. Tune
memory utilization for less than that.
4) Now maybe the drivers for WinXP will work a bit better, using the
same crappy environment everyone else is using. A 64 bit environment
and I/O drivers, are not always the best of friends.
5) Or alternately, find someone who knows how to fix 64 bit systems
and get dual socket motherboards to work :-)
I understand Photoshop has a tuning parameter, which is how much RAM
to grab. It could be that some of the problems are related to memory
management, but I don't know enough about Photoshop and your other tools,
to even guess at what to do. And as is usual with Photoshop questions,
a search engine seems to be useless for finding solid tech info
on Photoshop. If I wanted to know how to use a filter, or to use
layers, I could probably find an answer. But computing related issues
seem to be almost invisible when I search for them.
I don't see a SCSI card mentioned in the K8WE manual, so I assume
it is something you've added. When you get delayed write
failures, are they occurring on the SCSI side or on SATA ?
What SCSI card have you got ? And what is the model number
of the Opterons you are using ? A Google search using the
name of the SCSI controller, might turn up something.
Paul |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
BC
Guest
|
| Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 10:32 pm Post subject: Re: Tyan S2895 unhappiness |
|
|
Paul wrote:
| Quote: | I understand Photoshop has a tuning parameter, which is how much RAM
to grab. It could be that some of the problems are related to memory
management, but I don't know enough about Photoshop and your other tools,
to even guess at what to do. And as is usual with Photoshop questions,
a search engine seems to be useless for finding solid tech info
on Photoshop. If I wanted to know how to use a filter, or to use
layers, I could probably find an answer. But computing related issues
seem to be almost invisible when I search for them.
I don't see a SCSI card mentioned in the K8WE manual, so I assume
it is something you've added. When you get delayed write
failures, are they occurring on the SCSI side or on SATA ?
What SCSI card have you got ? And what is the model number
of the Opterons you are using ? A Google search using the
name of the SCSI controller, might turn up something.
|
Dear Richard and Paul,
models S2895UA2NRF and S2895UA2NRF-RS have built in SCSI:
Integrated SCSI Controller (option)
• LSI 53C1030 U320 SCSI controller
- Two U320 68-pin SCSI connectors
- Connected to PCI-X Bridge B
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8we.html
From Adobe's web site:
***
High-capacity RAM compatibility
Make the most of systems running 64-bit processors. Photoshop CS2 can
address approximately 3.5 GB of RAM on a Power Macintosh G5 running Mac
OS X, a Windows XP 64-bit Edition system running an Intel® Xeon™
processor with EM64T, or an AMD Athlon™ 64 or Opteron™ processor.
***
I do not see any mention of a 64 bit compatible version of PSCS2 on
their web site: just Win2K and XP SP1 and 2....
Looks like there will *not* be a 64 bit version for a while:
http://blogs.adobe.com/scottbyer/2006/12/64_bitswhen.html
Lots of discussion there....
http://news.com.com/2061-10791_3-6146229.html
Hmm, I do NOT run CS2 (um, Elements? Sorry....) but could it be that
the problem is in Adobe's program not taking advantage of the resources
available to it, and not the Tyan? That's the impression I get from
reading some of these articles....
So, as Paul mentioned, maybe checking in to a Photoshop forum and
comparing notes there would be of benefit.
HTH and good luck,
BC |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Martin Shoemaker
Guest
|
| Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 10:42 pm Post subject: Re: Tyan S2895 unhappiness |
|
|
I'm wondering why you think this is a hardware problem. I see similar
problems with other programs on my dual Opteron (XP64, S2892, not dual
core, and not nearly as loaded as yours). I also saw similar things on
my last computer, which was an Asus with an Athlon 64 and Win2K. Based
on what I see I would expect this to be either a problem in Photoshop
itself or a driver issue. One possibility is that the hardware is
outrunning the software. We had that problem back in the K6 era (or
maybe it was K5). Windows had software timing loops that were OK for 66
MHz, but didn't work at 100MHz. AMD caught a lot of flack and had their
reputation damaged, but it was Windows that needed to be, and was,
fixed. I'd like to think that programmers learned a lesson and now use
'test for finished' methods rather than software timing loops, but I
doubt that that is the case.
Martin
Richard wrote:
| Quote: | It's been just over a year now that I had this very expensive computer
built for me and frankly it has been very disappointing.
The board is fitted with a pair of dual core Opterons, 6G of ram, four
of the fastest Seagate SCSI drives, and a pair of Raptors in a raid 0
configuration to provide a scratch disk for Photoshop CS.
This computer was built to just run Photoshop as fast as possible, but
it has not lived up to expectations. It is a dual boot with XPPro32
and 64. I generally run it in 64 bit mode. I find that when doing
tasks, it often simply seems to stop running Photoshop and two entries
then appear in the task manager window showing both 'not responding'
If one waits some minutes the situation will generally correct
itself. Very frustrating when one has a deadline to meet.
I am also experiencing instances of warning of a failed write, and
this sometimes happens when saying a file. There is then nothing to
be done but to close down and loose ones work. Sometimes the only
way out is to simply turn off the power. I often find that when
closing down after a session that it will not close down after getting
to the closing down screen.
The computer has been back to the builders but they cannot find
anything wrong with it.
Any help would be very much appreciated.
Many thanks |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Fix your Windows Problems - FAST.
FREE Safe Scan Registry Check. Locate & Fix Errors in Minutes!
|
|
BC
Guest
|
| Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 11:50 pm Post subject: Re: Tyan S2895 unhappiness |
|
|
Richard wrote:
| Quote: | It's been just over a year now that I had this very expensive computer
built for me and frankly it has been very disappointing.
|
Dear Richard,
looks like tweaking CS2 is quite an art.
From Adobe's web site:
*Troubleshoot system errors or freezes in Photoshop (CS2) on Windows XP*
http://store1.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=327946
Perhaps a triple boot system?
Possibly a clean install of XP32, with minimal drivers and add ons, like
the above article mentions would allow CS2 to work a bit better.
Paul mentioned 4GB of RAM, 2G per processor: the most any of my machines
has is 2GB, but, I read of a lot of issues with people trying to use
even 4G, and being frustrated by their inability to do that. Maybe the
hardware is exceeding the software's abilities with that much RAM?
HTH,
BC |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Richard
Guest
|
| Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 4:02 am Post subject: Re: Tyan S2895 unhappiness |
|
|
In his posting of Mon, 29 Jan 2007, BC writes
| Quote: | Richard wrote:
It's been just over a year now that I had this very expensive
computer built for me and frankly it has been very disappointing.
Dear Richard,
looks like tweaking CS2 is quite an art.
From Adobe's web site:
*Troubleshoot system errors or freezes in Photoshop (CS2) on Windows XP*
http://store1.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=327946
Perhaps a triple boot system?
Possibly a clean install of XP32, with minimal drivers and add ons,
like the above article mentions would allow CS2 to work a bit better.
Paul mentioned 4GB of RAM, 2G per processor: the most any of my
machines has is 2GB, but, I read of a lot of issues with people trying
to use even 4G, and being frustrated by their inability to do that.
Maybe the hardware is exceeding the software's abilities with that much
RAM?
HTH,
BC
|
Guys
My apologies for the delay in getting back to you all and thanks for
your suggestions. I am fighting some deadlines at the moment so it may
be a day or so.
Cheers
Richard
--
Richard |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
| |
Watched Topics
Search
Register
Log in to check your private messages
Profile
Log in
Memberlist
Usergroups