running applications all at once

[st]

What is the best way to run applications? If I want to run spybot, adaware,
defrag and disk clean up will it get done faster if i run them all at once or
1 at a time or does it not matter. To me it does not seem like it should
matter.

 

[David H. Lipman]

From: "st" <[email protected]>

| What is the best way to run applications? If I want to run spybot, adaware,
| defrag and disk clean up will it get done faster if i run them all at once or
| 1 at a time or does it not matter. To me it does not seem like it should
| matter.

Sequentially.
NEVER simultaneouly !

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Depends on your computer. With multicore computers you can do quite a bit
more concurrently. I sometimes see Windows Defender scanning at the same
time my antivirus does. It doesn't seem to affect performance for me.
That's with a Q6600 cpu and lots of ram, though. If you are on a
single-core cpu and 1GB of ram it probably would be a better idea to run
them in series if you are manually running them.

 

[st]

But can someone explain it to me more why it matters. Because to me it seems
like if i spend 15 minutes per program and i am running each one seperately
and if i have 4 of them to run thats 1 hour. If i run them all at once to me
it seems like it would still take an hour.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

It might take more than an hour because when you run them concurrently the
OS will constantly be switching them in and out of the cpu and also the disk
head will be covering more real estate. There is some overhead involved.

 

[David H. Lipman]

From: "st" <[email protected]>

| But can someone explain it to me more why it matters. Because to me it seems
| like if i spend 15 minutes per program and i am running each one seperately
| and if i have 4 of them to run thats 1 hour. If i run them all at once to me
| it seems like it would still take an hour.
|

It doesn't matter how much RAM you have or the CPU type. It has to do with resources being
used.

When it come to defragging and disk cleanup you have much disk activity because the
processes are looking at all files and manipulating them in different ways. You can't
defrag a disk whiles other processes are reading and writing to the disk. In fact it is
suggested that as many applications as possible be closed such that they can perform their
respective jobs properly.

When it comes to adware/spyware/virus scans each not only examines all or specified files
and areas of the Registry and other adware/spyware/virus scans will interfere with each
other. Each should exclusive access to the hard disk and files on them to do their job
properly.

Your assumptions are faulty. You have to understand what each process is doing, how they
are going about the process and how much resources they need to perform their respective
function.

To have each do their job properly run them Sequentially and never simultaneously.

 

[HeyBub]

But can someone explain it to me more why it matters. Because to me
it seems like if i spend 15 minutes per program and i am running each
one seperately and if i have 4 of them to run thats 1 hour. If i run
them all at once to me it seems like it would still take an hour.

A good example of multi-tasking efficiency is printing. A fifteen minute
print job and a fifteen minute file update job, when run concurrently,
finish in 16 minutes. Run sequentially they finish in 30 minutes.

Conversely, two fifteen minute print jobs take 30 minutes to finish (on the
same printer). It depends on the job mix.

I'd say, barring logical conflicts, a mix of jobs won't be any SLOWER when
run together....

 

[throwitout]

What is the best way to run applications? If I want to run spybot, adaware,
defrag and disk clean up will it get done faster if i run them all at once or
1 at a time or does it not matter. To me it does not seem like it should
matter.

I'd say 1 at a time. If you don't want to worry about it, schedule
this stuff to happen overnight.

Each of those programs are hard drive intensive and your hard drive is
the slowest part of your computer. Each program will be accessing a
different part of the hard drive at the same time and as such the read/
write head will be doing a LOT of seeking, and while it is seeking
none of the programs are getting anything done. Plus depending on what
other programs you have running, and the amount of RAM your system
has, you may be swaping a lot of stuff to and from the page file which
will dramatically reduce system performance. As well by moving around
a lot you're going to lose benefit of the various caches / buffers. If
only one program is used at a time, chances are as it goes through the
disk the next part it needs to access will be near what it is
currently accessing, reducing seek times.

As well some programs like Defrag are unable to access files that are
in use which is why people recommended that you minimize the number of
open programs

 

[Ken Blake]

It might take more than an hour because when you run them concurrently the
OS will constantly be switching them in and out of the cpu and also the
disk head will be covering more real estate. There is some overhead
involved.

There also might be extra paging required.