Finally tracked the problem down!
Idiotic as it may be it was a windows set to "power saving" mode that kept Qimage running at 800mhz on a single core. Benchmarks taxed the system enough to kick in all 4 cores at 3.5ghz, but qimage by itself wouldn't do it... Never occurred to me to check as I never touch power management on my desktop, and my ASUS control panel is always set to "performance". Simply switching windows to "performance" lets me hit 25-40% CPU load at 4ghz in qimage: 5x-10x faster depending on job.
Thanks again for the help!

Terry

Fred now that's what I'd like to see!

With shift Qimage reports more believable numbers:
Start: 2146MB
Addl: 1536MB
Now: 2146MB

NOTE there seems to be a bug in windows CPU reporting - the details tab in performance manager reports processor use at 18-25%, where the main tab reports as 5-10%...    So it's possible it is purely a multi-core issue I suppose...

"300dpi" was the "High-300 PPI" Interpolation setting in qimage (driver is 600)

Yes 20+ minutes with Fusion scaling! I gave up half way through and retested with vector scaling to get the 6min result.

Whew getting tricky eh! Thanks everyone for keeping at it

Updated bios, checked settings, and verified all cores are working correctly for other apps (hit 100% in prime95, 60% in BF4). Qimage doesn't seem to be using even 1 core fully - 5-10% usage typical, so even a full 25% that a full core would utilize would be a big boost. I'm wondering if its a RAM issue? TerryM is qimage actually using 30% or your RAM? The 50MB average I'm seeing seems really low...

Qimage analyze current settings found nothing.

These 3 tests all run with identical settings to the initial tests @ 300dpi except the final vector test for comparison with Fred's single image test times as I didn't know what his setting was for his 3min reference: The surprising bit for me was the single image scale test taking substantially longer than the 3 tiled images with the same settings:

3 images, x1 ea, tiled on a single 44x47 page, Fusion 5min
Single image from same job scaled to fill 44x47 page, Fusion 20min+
Single image from same job scaled to fill 44x47 page,  Vector 6min

"Off-Line" = paused windows print queue to prevent test from printing. Identical results with "live" printer & printer connection is gigabit ethernet. This should only be an issue during actual printing, not during qimage's processing stage, as no data is sent to printer until after qimage has finished up.

"slow" has no direct basis for comparison, It just felt slow compared to what I remember from my old shop where I was running older workstations, and when I saw the resource use that really got me wondering if something was awry...

No Joy - all cores checked already...

This performance chart may be more relevant:

Thanks for the responses! Here is a bunch more info and some screenshots:

This is a "light" duty typical example with JPEGS only
This took exactly 5 minutes to process.
44x47in page size, 3 individual images
3000-6000pixels on the long side
The vast majority of that time shows as "processing" image... other states flash through in seconds.
Load times were fast - a few seconds per image.
Attached system resource charts are identical from job to job regardless of format/settings/page size - only time needed changes
Qimage RAM use peaked briefly at 180mb but averaged much lower
EMF vs RAW had no impact on processing times - both 5min
Increasing resolution from 300 to 600 to match driver setting quadruples processing times
Files are local & though the printers are networked this example was done offline (transfer speeds to printers are not an issue)
I rarely do multi-page layouts and use a 5 sec time delay for multiples. 


Terry

Hi Folks,
For some reason qimage doesn't seem to be able to use my workstation's power - jobs are taking a very long time to process, but the system doesn't seem to be taxing itself at all. Qimage behaves as if it's using the full system resources (pausing/locking frequently while it's working), but the system itself seems to be barely lifting a finger...

 i7 4770k processor, 32GB Ram, system on SSD, working files on a traditional HDD, Windows 8.1, CPU sits between 5 and 10% while processing, RAM use is minimal, HDD transfer rates are a fraction of capacity.

In Qimage multi-core processing is enabled, changing sharpening to vector certainly speeds it up but still slow and does not increase resource use. Happens on both my canon and epson printers, from all tested file formats. Recently upgraded from a few months old version to the latest with no change

I can't seem to find the bottleneck - any ideas?

Terry