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Originally Posted by renormalised
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With your work, your biggest bottleneck is the HD ... Your RAM, no matter how much you have, can't handle all that processing concurrently anyway, that's why your computer has a swap file on the HD to dump page memory to.
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Well no, my biggest bottleneck was actually processor capacity and memory!! Swap files will never be fast enough, especially for real time apps, unless they are on a solid state device, and even that is no guarantee. A multi-core processor like mine is capable of threading across 8 CPUs and 64 bits means I can use all of my 6G memory for those processors (cf: 3G max in Win 32 I think?). While not quite enough to prevent swap file use, 6G will get close if I don't start up other memory hungry apps (eg CCDStack, Photoshop etc) while imaging and assuming the apps I'm running aren't too old so that they rely on a swap file being present for normal operation.
So the objective is really to minimise the use of a swap file with a suitably powerful processor and an adequate amount of RAM. Some say you can eliminate the swap file altogether with 12G or more of memory in Win7 64 bit machine but that's probably unwise.
Quote:
Originally Posted by renormalised
The point I was making is that most software, including MS's, is overbloated with "functionality" choices that most will never use, and that costs accordingly. For astrophotography, you need fairly powerful software in much of the cases you use it for, but most of your power you need is in the computer. Even some of the astrophotography software could be said to be bloatware because of some of the (actually) superfluous functionality built into it. For instance, do you really need any photometric analysis routines in your software at all?? Fourier analysis routines etc etc...just to take and process piccies??
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Bloatware: A term used to describe software that is amply endowed with functionality to suit the vast majority of users. Cf:
Waifware: Software that has enough functionality to satisfy only the needs of an elite few, ignoring the needs of most users ... but it runs really fast and lean!
