Slow Performance

chrisfromneptune

Newbie

Posts: 6

« on: May 28, 2018, 12:27:45 PM »

Hi,

I find QImage Ultimate v2018.117 extremely slow processing prints - can take > 10 minutes for a print using only 1 CPU core of an 8 core i7-7700k 16GB Ram 256GB SSD Win10 machine. A 2 year old version of QImage did that same task on same hardware in less than 2 minutes.

I've played with preference for multithreading for image/print to auto or use all 8 cores, with no improvement. If I print to file it is the same long amount of time processing images. I can verify via Resource Manager that the system is basically doing nothing, no wait on disk or anything. It hovers at 10-12% CPU, thread affinity set to all cores, power profile set to maximum. This machine is fast for other application and has no issues.

Shift-Analyze current settings says Start: 2146MB, Addl: 909 MB, Now: 2146 MB.

I hope this can be fixed as the speed is too unbearable to be productive - if you need any other info please let me know, otherwise I will have to switch to an old version or find another solution.

Chris


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admin

Administrator
Forum Superhero

Posts: 4123

Re: Slow Performance

« Reply #1 on: May 28, 2018, 12:58:09 PM »

This is system related and not Qimage related but let's see if we can find what is causing your system to limit it to only one core. When you first start QU, how many cores are reported on the splash screen? If it reports 8 cores and you set the multithreading to 8, it will use 8 threads. From an application standpoint, that is all that can be done. From that point, it is up to the operating system to manage the 8 threads and allow them to all run at the same time. At that point, you can check the affinity in task manager: open task manager and right click "Go to details". Then right click on the Qimage.exe process and select "Affinity". See if all cores are checked.

In cases like this, I sometimes find that the user has set compatibility for the QU icon to Windows XP or done some other change that overrides the "all cores affinity" that is set in the Qimage.exe.

Regards,
Mike


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chrisfromneptune

Newbie

Posts: 6

Re: Slow Performance

« Reply #2 on: May 28, 2018, 01:10:39 PM »

Thank you for your reply Mike. I already mentioned the affinity was set to all 8 cores in Task Manager. On startup QImage says 8 cores. I've also tried reinstalling it to no avail.

I am a software developer so I know all about threading and know that the system can use all threads - I have custom WPF and UWP applications I have developed that use a threadpool and can max out the CPU at 95-100% as well. I can confirm that the compatibility is not set to run in older version of windows and nothing has been tweaked here. Running as administrator or not does not make a difference as well.

Is there anything else you can think of?


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admin

Administrator
Forum Superhero

Posts: 4123

Re: Slow Performance

« Reply #3 on: May 29, 2018, 02:16:25 AM »

No. The Qimage process is running 8 separate threads. Beyond that, it is up to the OS to manage them so there has to be something on your machine that is denying the Qimage process from using more than one core at a time. The only other possibility would be a printer driver that is responding so slowly that it isn't the (Qimage) calculations that are taking the time, but rather the driver being very slow at responding or accepting the data. Do you have another printer? It might be interesting to try the same job on a different printer.

Mike


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chrisfromneptune

Newbie

Posts: 6

Re: Slow Performance

« Reply #4 on: May 29, 2018, 04:02:50 AM »

I mainly print to two printers - Canon IPF6400 and Pro-2000, however as I mentioned this slowness occurs when printing to file as well. As a test, I printed the exact same job to file over multiple versions of QImage Ultimate (uninstalled and reinstalled old versions):

v2018.117: 10 minutes 4 seconds
v2017.120: 2 minutes 33 seconds
v2016.146: 2 minutes 48 seconds (to PDF instead as couldn't find print to file option)

then I reinstalled the latest again:
v2018.117: 9 minutes 35 seconds

For every version, CPU usage of QImage all hovered around 8-14% CPU so perhaps the bottleneck isn't in CPU. Disk was idle and memory about 60% used, nothing else running on the system at the time of these tests. I'll have to stick to v2017.120, but if you need me to test anything just let me know, otherwise I'll keep an eye on the changelog in future to see if there are any fixes in performance.

Chris


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