T
Tony Whyman
I have come across an unexpected performance problem with
a new Pentium 4 CPU (with hyperthreading), Win2K (SP4),
Office 2k (SP3) and a client application that drives Word
and PPt through Ole Automation objects.
This application has been through extensive development
and performed well until it was put on the above
combination when performance nose dived. Task Manager
showed that the system was mostly idle even though both
the client application and Winword should have been using
as much CPU as was available, limited only by the disk
transfer rate. The client application was essentially
parsing a word document and pulling text and style
information on a paragraph by paragraph basis.
Setting the client app's affinity to a single CPU was
found to improve matters greatly, doing the same to
Winword restored expected performance to normal levels.
The best fix was in the end to turn off hyperthreading in
the BIOS.
It looks like there is a serious scheduling problem with
multiple (logical) CPUs and OLE Automation, or perhaps a
more general problem with hyperthreading. Has anyone else
seen a similar problem?
a new Pentium 4 CPU (with hyperthreading), Win2K (SP4),
Office 2k (SP3) and a client application that drives Word
and PPt through Ole Automation objects.
This application has been through extensive development
and performed well until it was put on the above
combination when performance nose dived. Task Manager
showed that the system was mostly idle even though both
the client application and Winword should have been using
as much CPU as was available, limited only by the disk
transfer rate. The client application was essentially
parsing a word document and pulling text and style
information on a paragraph by paragraph basis.
Setting the client app's affinity to a single CPU was
found to improve matters greatly, doing the same to
Winword restored expected performance to normal levels.
The best fix was in the end to turn off hyperthreading in
the BIOS.
It looks like there is a serious scheduling problem with
multiple (logical) CPUs and OLE Automation, or perhaps a
more general problem with hyperthreading. Has anyone else
seen a similar problem?