Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

Hi Mike

As noted elsewhere my repository of images is my NAS and as it only runs at 100 not yet Gigabit I have found QU (compared to my DAM program and indeed CS2) is sluggish to load and cache RAWs, build thumbnails etc.

I have now done a simple test and selected a folder of 599 images that QU has never accessed before on an internal hard drive i.e. not the NAS.  Though I have not measured the speed I can say the difference compared to the NAS access is not great!  I would estimate it as only being approx 25% faster if that.

Do you have any general recommendations for tuning QU to be faster?

For the record this PC is :- W2kPro SP4, 2.26Ghz P4, 2 GB RAM, separate HDD for page file, image files on NAS but some copied archives on smaller internal HDDs.  So maybe not state of the art by todays standards but no slouch as I have used it to NLE video in the past.

Oh, something else I have noticed is that with each new build when QU launches and opens the last folder accessed where the cache & thumbs were 'built' it starts again with RAW cache & thumbs building ~ is this normal behaviour???  As it certainly slows things down rather too much, would have thought that the new build could use the cached data of the last build???  Oh and yes after each new version installation I have rebooted the PC  ;)

TIA for your answers  :)

In this case, you basically have an outdated PC.  A P4 system only has one processor so it will have to go through the raw thumbs one at a time.  In handling raws one at a time, it will take that P4 CPU a dozen seconds or more on raws from some of the more recent cameras so that is going to be the major tie-up, not disk access.  On a quad core system, all four CPU's will be processing thumbs at the same time.  It's like having 4 registers open at checkout in the store instead of one.  Plus, every CPU on that quad core system will probably be about 2x as fast as your 2.26 GHZ P4 anyway.  That means that today's "average" quad core system is going to be about 8x faster than your P4 at building thumbs (and printing) in Qimage.

Now, Qimage will not re-cache your thumbs just because you installed a new version.  I think you are misjudging what is happening.  Either that or you didn't let the thumbs/cache build completely the last time you exited so it still has stuff to do when you revisit the folder.  When you go to a folder, it always says "building thumbs" and then "building raw cache".  If all are already built, you see the two appear very quickly but no countdown because it discovers they are already built.  On a local drive, that probably happens so fast you can't even see it.  On a NAS drive, you may see the words appear but nothing is actually being done (except for it checking to see IF they are built).

Mike

Hi Mike

Thanks for the insight re PC ~ yes, a new build is long overdue and I have in mind an i7 running W7 64bit with 8GB of RAM

I will have to pay more attention to the 'message' on the top about build RAW etc because what I said was relying on memory hence the test (?) I did with a folder on a local drive, so I surmise based on your feedback about this old warhorse of a PC the relative slowness is down to the antiquity of this PC?

Thanks again :)