I have a web application, and my users are complaining about performance. I have been able to narrow it down to JavaScript in IE6 issues, which I need to resolve. I have found the excellent dynaTrace AJAX tool, but my problem is that I don't have any issues on my dev machine.
The problem is that my users' computers are ancient, so timings which are barely noticable on my machine are perhaps 3-5 times longer on theirs, and suddenly the problem is a lot larger. Is it possible somehow to degrade the performance of my dev machine, or preferrably of a VM running on my dev machine, to the specs of my customers' computers?
I don't know of any virtualization solutions that can do this, but I do know that the computer/CPU emulator Bochs allows you to specify a limit on the number of emulated instructions per second, which you can use to simulate slower CPUs.
I am not sure if you can cpu bound it, but in VirutalBox or Parallel, you can bound the memory usage. I assume if you only give it about 128MB then it will be very slow. You can also limit the throughput on the network with a lot of tools. I guess the only thing I am not sure about is the CPU. That's tricky. Curious to know what you find. :)
You could get a copy of VMWare Workstation and choke the CPU of your VM.
With most virtual PC software you can limit the amount of RAM, but you are not able to set the CPU to a slower speed as it does not emulate a CPU, but uses the host CPU.
You could go with some emulation software like bochs that will let you setup an x89 processor environment.
You may try Fossil Toys
* PC Speed
PC CPU speed monitor / benchmark. With logging facility.
* Memory Load Test
Test application/operating system behaviour under low memory conditions.
* CPU Load Test
Test application/operating system behaviour under high CPU load conditions.
Although it doesn't simulate a specific CPU clock speed.
Related
I currently have a problem, that some packages are getting dropped in my local network.
But just on one device.
Ping to local router
Here you can see a ping to my router. I only have this problem on my pc. Mobilephone and Laptops are completly fine.
I tried a network card and two Wlan usb sticks all with the same problem.
Does somebody a clue on what could cause these problems?
*OS: Windows 10 21H2
*CPU usage ideling around 4-10%
*RAM usage 40%
*Network usage 0-1%
Your question is a bit broad - there are so many things that can disturb a network connection, from physical issues (i.e. cable defects, WIFI interference), to driver problems, CPU bottlenecks, etc. That being said, I would tip at a CPU bottleneck (app using most or all of your CPU), but even that is by no means certain.
Take a look at you CPU usage with TaskManager or ProcessExplorer (from the Sysinternals package). They both also show network usage. If your machine shows excessive CPU (constantly over 30% with frequent peeks), then you might want to explorer the reasons for that, and there can be many.
Using those same tools you can also try to identify apps that are possibly using alot of network bandwidth.
Windows has much happening in the background and those processes require resources (CPU, RAM, Network, Harddisk, etc.). Should any of those resources be limited then, you can easily see issues as you describe as there is a certain interdependence between those resources, i.e. you have many apps running with limited RAM, that leads to paging and as the hard disk is slow, the CPU is then busy with data shoveling and can't keep up with the NIC requests.
However, I am theorizing here. Supply some hard data (machine config, OS Info, Network info/config, task list, CPU usage, etc.) and we can continue.
I need to optimize the app I'm working on and I can't get reliable profiling data on my development machine. The app should run on low end ARM hardware on QNX, but from logistic reasons I don't have access to the final hardware for profiling.
I've tried to do profiling on my development machine, but as you can imagine everything is so fast that I can't pin point the slow parts. I've created a Linux virtual machine with reduced memory and CPU cores count, but they are still too fast compared to the final hardware.
Is it possible to reduce the CPU clock speed/ram speed/disk speed in a virtual machine to simulate low performance hardware or is there any other way to get relevant profiling data on my development machine?
Considering the app is processing several gigabytes of data I assume disk access is a major bottleneck and limiting disk speed might help
I can use any (as in most open source and commercially available) tool/approach that runs on Windows/Linux/MacOS on real or virtual machine.
This URL describes how to limit disk bandwidth on VirtualBox images. You could run a Linux VM on Virtualbox and use this method to limit disk access speeds, turn off Disk Caching using suggestions from this answer and profile your application. Alternatively you can download QNX SDP, which comes with the option of a prebuilt x86_64 Virtual Machine image that can be run using VMWare/Virtualbox/qemu
My previous experiences with QNX on armv7 and x86_64 suggest that the devb-sdmmc driver is possibly a bottleneck when working with a lot of big files being read from flash storage. devb-sdmmc and io-blk often require fine tuning of the drivers with proper cache, block, read-ahead size and other parameters helps improve disk access performance.
I'm running windows 10 with 4GBs of DDR3 1066 on Intel second generation i5 mobile architecture.
I come from a OSX background mostly and memory has always been a concern for me because I prefer to have many tabs open. I noticed on OSX that the memory usage didn't relate that much to the performance of the applications so long as it wasn't fully saturated but easily on my iMac I can run 80% of memory and find no noticeable lag or stuttering. However on Windows I'm finding memory to be the major bottleneck in my system, I understand that upgrading to 8 or 16GBs of memory would be the upgrade path for me. However I would love to understand why my system slows down noticeably when I saturate 80% of the memory unlike OSX that seems to handle it just fine. Is it a bandwidth limitation? I know that Windows NT and Darwin are completely different Kernels and I would love to be educated in exactly how that affects the same usage scenario so differently.
Thank you in advance.
Is there some tool which allows one to control the MS-Windows (XP-SP3 32-bit in my case) scheduler, s.t. a target application (which I'd like to test), operates as if it is running on a slower CPU. Say my physical host is a 2.4GHzv Dual-Core, but I'd like the application to run as if, it is running on a 800MHz/1.0GHz CPU.
I am aware of some such programs which allowed old DOS games to run slower, but AFAIK, they take the approach of consuming CPU cycles to starve the application. I do not want such a thing, and also would like to have higher precision control on the clock.
I don't believe you'll find software that directly emulates the different CPUs. But something like ProcessLasso would let you control a programs CPU usage. Thus simulating, in a way, a slower clock speed.
I also found this blog entry with many other ways to throttle your CPU: Windows CPU throttling techniques
Additionally, if you have access to VMWare you could setup a resource pool with a limited CPU reservation.
I would like a software environment in which I can test the speed of my software on hardware with specific resources. For example, how fast does this program run on an 800MHz x86 with 24 Mb of RAM, when my host hardware is a 3GHz quad core amd64 with 12GB of RAM? Emulators such as qemu make a great point of running "almost as fast" as the underlying hardware; I would like to make it run slower. Is there a way to do that?
I have never tried it, but perhaps you could achieve what you want to some extent by combining an emulator like QEMU or VirtualBox on Linux with something like this:
http://cpulimit.sourceforge.net/
If you can limit the CPU time available to the emulator you might be able to simulate the results of execution on a slower computer. Keep in mind, though, that this would only affect the execution speed (or so I hope, anyway).
The CPU instruction set and other system features would remain unchanged. This means that emulating a specific processor accurately would be difficult if not impossible.
In addition, using something like cpulimit, which works using SIGSTOP and SIGCONT to repeatedly stop/restart the emulator process might cause side-effects, such as timing inconsistencies, video display artifacts etc.
In your emulator, keep a virtual "clock" and increment it appropriately as you execute each instruction. From there you can simply report how long it took in virtual time to execute, or you can have your emulator sleep now and again to keep execution speed roughly where it would be in the target.