Prime95 slowing down a server
 

I have Prime95 v23.7.1 running on a P4-2.8 Dell server with Win Server 2003. When it is running, the odd thing seems to be slower than it should be. I didn't think much of it until today when I inserted a cd-rom. It's autorun started, but wouldn't actually appear until I stopped Prime95.

Has anyone had anything like this happen? I've been using Prime95 on dozens of systems for over 5 years without any trouble before.

As a follow-up, having stopped Prime95 for a few hours now, users are reporting faster log-ins, etc. The priority on the prime95.exe process was set to low, but it appears to have been slowing various things down.

Could it be that Prime95 was running a P-1 test and ran out of memory? How much memory is installed in the server and how much are you allowing Prime95 to use? You can check the second figure in prime.ini

[QUOTE=Jeremy Pharoah]I have Prime95 v23.7.1 running on a P4-2.8 Dell server with Win Server 2003. When it is running, the odd thing seems to be slower than it should be. I didn't think much of it until today when I inserted a cd-rom. It's autorun started, but wouldn't actually appear until I stopped Prime95.

Has anyone had anything like this happen? I've been using Prime95 on dozens of systems for over 5 years without any trouble before.[/QUOTE]

I've had a similar experience with Prime95 on Windows 2000. I'm not sure why, but when Prime95 starts doing it's thing, it's as if it has a higher priority than all the other stuff that's loading on start-up. If I right-click and stop Prime95, everything else goes back to normal and finishes loading. Then when I right-click and hit continue, it resumes work without the odd problem.

Is this a hyperthreaded machine? If so, the OS will run real work on one "cpu" and prime95 on the "other cpu". But since there really is just one physical cpu, prime95 will slow down your real work.

Turn hyperthreading off in the BIOS or uninstall prime95

My PC (any of which have this problem, actually) is not HT. It's not even an Intel processor. The latest is an AMD Barton 2500+. Before that it was dual Athlon 1900+s; my P3 850 laptop also has the issue, I believe.

[QUOTE=PrimeCruncher]The latest is an AMD Barton 2500+. Before that it was dual Athlon 1900+s[/QUOTE]

Has Barton2500 better performance in Prime95/MPrime than dual Athlon 1900s? What's the frequency in MHz of an Athlon1900?

[QUOTE=optim]Has Barton2500 better performance in Prime95/MPrime than dual Athlon 1900s? What's the frequency in MHz of an Athlon1900?[/QUOTE]

Barton 2500+ runs at 1.83GHz stock. 1900+ MPs run at 1.6GHz stock. I had to switch them around because about half of the capacitors on the dual socket A board went bad. I'm waiting for the Opteron/Athlon 64 to fully take over so I can get a dual-A mobo cheap, then it'll become part of the farm that I'm actually planning to start working on today.

The server was not running P-1. It is not HyperThreading. I've got Prime95 running on a couple of servers that are HT and it and they work without a hitch.