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Delay loading MS Office documents when agent is running

I have recently installed the WCG Windows agent on my new laptop, and I have noticed a considerable delay loading Microsoft Office documents. Sound strange, I know, but when I snooze the agent, documents load very quickly (it's a nice laptop). Any thoughts on how to correct this without shutting down the agent?

Thanks,

Greg
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Sekerob
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Re: Delay loading MS Office documents when agent is running

hi gknowles,

actually many thoughts have been shared on this forum. Thing is, with the heavy WCG crunch taking so much ram, @ the lowest priority for the agent/science, it will step aside as far as CPU time is concerned, but it still accupies the RAM, that office hungry applications also like to use, so it start swapping out parts of the science to disk. I just yesterday put 512mb more in totalling 1.5gig, which is expensive if put in laptops. On my desktop, the diskswappping has virtually disappeared and Excel particular loads much faster. As side affect, the overall clock time (which is different from the CPU time) for a WU to complete has also markedly reduced......did not change anything to my benchmark, but that was to be expected,

ciao
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[Edit 1 times, last edit by Sekerob at Aug 22, 2006 1:50:10 PM]
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RT
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Re: Delay loading MS Office documents when agent is running

As Sekerob points out, physical memory size is the most likely cause. It takes a bit for the science program pages to get swapped out so the Office app can occupy the page frames. When you shut down the Office app, the frames are re-occupied by the science app.

I cannot think of any way to avoid this other than the obvious, "add physical memory". Or live with the startup delay.

I must say, the snoozing of the agent should not actually make the Office app load faster but once running, if the agent is snoozed, it would not compete for page frames so the Office app should perform about as well as is possible on the particular computer.

Regards and Thanks for contributing.
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Re: Delay loading MS Office documents when agent is running

Hi Greg,

What you are experiencing is not strange at all, it happens when the total RAM requirements of the programs you are running exceeds the RAM in your computer.

How much RAM do you have?
What is your CPU speed?
Have you defragmented your disk and page file recently?

We can advise you better if we know a bit about your computer but here are a few facts to think about. WCG has 2 projects online at the moment, FAAH and HDC (Fight Aids at Home and Help Defeat Cancer). The HDC project has a fairly big RAM requirement whereas the FAAH project has a much smaller RAM requirement. If you are signed up for the HDC project then unsubscribe from it and run only the FAAH.
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Re: Delay loading MS Office documents when agent is running

Thanks for the quick responses! I had considered resource issues briefly as a potential source of the slow-down. However...It is a fairly powerful laptop with Intel Core Duo 2.16 GHz processor and 2 GB of RAM. I'm currently using about 1.5 GB of memory and CPU is about 30-40% (due to the WCG agent).

Here's what I see when I launch an MS Office app with the WCG agent running
- up to 30s delay loading even a small Word document ~40K
- Little to no change in memory footprint
- Very little hard drive activity
- No change in CPU

However, if I open Word first, then open the document from the File->Open menu, it loads very quickly--both Word and the document open in less than 2s each.

If I 'snooze' the WCG Agent, the document opens in less than 2s.

Greg
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Sekerob
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Re: Delay loading MS Office documents when agent is running

Somewhere here i posted a tweak that gives the prefetch preference to APPS over services and boot up....laptops to put in hibernation or standby....might help, also the hibernation would stand u not to loose a second of crunch on resume. With 2gb ram i'd keep excel and word and outlook in minimized to startbar mode all the time. Outlook always lingers in the systray.

PS, the latest screamer laptop seen was a core duo with 20 inch 16:9, yes you see it right, weighing in at near 6.5kg. Lifted it to check....the shoulder strap will hurt when traveling, but great to watch that dvs and the whole plane with you....if u can get it thru new security controls.
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[Aug 22, 2006 2:59:07 PM]   Link   Report threatening or abusive post: please login first  Go to top 
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