Upgrading show PC thoughts

[zwiller]

Wanted to get some other opinions that my trusty old Dell 100L 2.4G Intel Celeron with 2G RAM is not gonna cut it with a display of maybe up to 1,500 nodes with 100 dmx channels.  I am running 2.5.  PC was already acting slower with just some preliminary testing of a window frame of 60 nodes and only one transition.  I was hoping to squeak by with keeping the sequences basic which is fine with me since it is first year for both LSP and RGB but I don't know if I will be lucky. 

Guessing it is time, so I have this one in mind.  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login  Plan to give it a go with the stock 4G RAM and max RAM out to 16G if need be.  I need to do some further digging as Intel specs state max RAM is 16G but ASUS says 8G...   

Any thoughts?  Thanks in advance.

[jeffcoast]

Go with the max ram from ASUS, as they would be the ones that actually designed it. The Intel chipset may be capable of handling 16, but if Asus made some change, that could decrease the amount it would use.

[tbone321]

A friend of mine has one of these machines and he has put in more than 8 gig and it took it but there may be some instability issues above 8 gig.

[Mickpat]

Are you planning just to run the show using this laptop or is this your sequencing machine too?  What adaptor are you using for your show?  USB or Etherdongle?  Performance with an Etherdongle is much faster than USB.  If you are using USB, I would recommend building an Etherdongle instead of buying a new laptop.  The bottleneck is USB throughput and not CPU or memory.

[zwiller]

Thanks for comments so far.  Maybe there is hope the old Dell after all!

I originally planned to use the Dell to sequence and run show both with LSP this year.  For some reason I only expected issues with running show, not sequencing, as I heard the scheduler was fixed with 2.5 and I have a few more options for running show: use the Conductor if it arrives this season or run show with xlights.  In addition, I have the etherdongle and use it now.  Sorry for not mentioning it. 

As I type this I now realize my concern is primarily sequencing right now.  Seems like I am seeing the Dell bog down already with just a hundred channels or so and I am just starting to use LSP.  Maybe I don't have it set up best for sequencing.  Right now I haven't drew any channels in and just have a SSC hooked up to make sure its blinking with a test sequence.

[tbone321]

Depending on how old it is, you may want to stick another GIG of memory in te Dell and see what happens.  LSP is a bit of a meory hog which may be what is slowing you down.   

[zwiller]

I've got the Dell maxed out at 2GB.  Good idea though.  I bet it would help if I could have 4GB in there. 

After Mickpat’s post I started to think about how LSP works.  As he pointed out sequencing and running show are two different things which I suppose I got mixed up based on years of vixen programming.  Then I watched more of David's vids relating to sequencing and I noticed even on his machine (which is got to be nice) the processing of transitions and macros take time.  Then it hit me: what I am noticing is only the processing time to generate sequencing effect.  It will be interesting to see how long on the Dell it will take to generate a transition on a fully populated visualizer.  I am going to finish mine then try and see. 

[peteandvanessa]

For what's it's worth, I'm running nearly 5000 channels of LED Flexstrip on LSP on a Laptop, Win7 64 bit, i7 Quad core, 8Gig RAM and dedicated graphics cars with a solid state drive.
I did try LSP on a Core 2 Duo, 2Gig RAM, i7 laptop and the time to generate effects was pretty bad, it took a minute of so to add in a single transition across the flexstrips when sequencing, so that wasn't going to fly.

Generating a single effect (using one of the color slider macro) across all the flextrips takes about 10-15 seconds on the Quad core Laptop, so even on the higher end machine sequencing can be quite slow.

Looking at David's machine, I believe he's using an HP z820 machine, so that's an eight core, workstation and hence why his effects get generated in a few seconds.

[Steve Gase]

I'd invest my money in an upgrade to my home machine that I'd use for sequence generation -- and take any old system (including your laptop) and use it as my show computer to run xLights.

The visualizer adds extra processing to your show, if LSP can be configured to disable the grid view and the visualizer, it might get comparable speeds... but i think xLight's file format which is optimized for playback, gives it an advantage. 

I also think RAM is less important for xlights, and if you wanted to spend money on improving it further, I'd upgrade the laptop disk drive to use an SSD drive instead -- much more reliable, and better performance than the 5400rpm drives normally found in a laptop.

[zwiller]

Then reality set in...   

Pete, you talking 5,000 RGB channels (150,000) right?  Or like 1,667 RGB (5,000)?  I am planning upwards to 1,500 RGB channels (4,500). 

Steve, do you think the machine I posted will work or do I need a Ferrari like yours?   

[peteandvanessa]

Then reality set in...   

Pete, you talking 5,000 RGB channels (150,000) right?  Or like 1,667 RGB (5,000)?  I am planning upwards to 1,500 RGB channels (4,500). 

Steve, do you think the machine I posted will work or do I need a Ferrari like yours?   

I'm talking about 5000 channels of RGB (or in other terms 5000/3 = 1666 nodes) so similar to what you are planning.

I've tested the LSP scheduler and on my most complex sequence, it uses about 400-700MBytes of memory when running the sequences in the scheduler and consumes about 15% - 20% of the CPU.

Now I have also tested the same sequence in XLights by getting FrankR to convert it to the XLights format
see thread here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login

The same sequence run in XLights the CPU utilization is so low, it doesn’t even register a % (couldn’t believe it at first, had to check a couple of times to make sure)
Memory utilization is ridiculously low at 49MBytes, again barely registering

So XLights is super efficient running the converted sequences.

[Steve Gase]

For the playback/show computer, most of my upgrade advice is not needed.

For sequencing however, I think anything you can do to upgrade will lower frustration, and make your sequencing experience more enjoyable.  When I do sequencing or programming, having a fast computer allows me more time to try something, throw it away, and try something else.  With a fast computer you spend less time frustrated by the tools.

Is 2.5 better than 2.0?  ...every indication leads me to that conclusion, but I haven't had the time to play with 2.5 yet, and I can't say if the software improvements go far enough. 


I've heard no one say that having too much memory hurts LSP.
So, even if you don't max out your computer now, having the ability to add more memory is something that should help later.


myself... I'd spend money to optimize the system in the following order:

• memory
• cpu cores
• disk
• cpu speed

[caretaker]

To add to what the others are saying you want your sequencing machine to have a minimum of 8 gigs ram (16 would be better) a 3.0 MHz quad core processor (or better) and a good mid level video card (to take the video processing load of the CPU) .  You can find some good deals on bare-bones systems at Tiger Direct but you might be better off just piecing together a system from NewEgg.  Do your home work and remember that a AMD processor will be cheaper that and equivalent Intel processor.   

[zwiller]

So I did some more testing last night.  It did not go well.  In fact, my Halloween sequence which is quite simple, just 4 aethers with random long fades and lightning lasting 2 minutes long completely maxes out the CPU.  The virtualizer is jittery.  I confirmed no malware, etc and I don’t have anything else running.  Does this seem right?  Sure, I expect issues with some high channel counts but just 12?  At this point it’s clear I need to upgrade if I plan to use LSP unless I have something wrong.  Hoping its a newbie mistake. 

[peteandvanessa]

That sounds familiar, when I started earlier this year, I loaded LSP onto an Intel Dual core set up and also on an Intel Core 2 Duo, neither ran LSP adequately. That's when I bit the bullet and got a new Laptop i7 with Quad Cores.

I know that the LSP sequencer is pretty heavy on memory and also the CPU

Did you optimize the sequence in the sequencer to see if that helped?