I finished setting up the new quad-core machine and ran my
first tests today, so am posting the promised test results. All I can say
is Wow! Really nice improvements, even better than
I expected to see in my highest hopes. I am happy as a
pig in sh*t !! 8 - )
For background, the test was an optimization run on a
single ticker, which is how I will be running all my other tests
( ticker was QID, 468 EOD data bars ). All tests used the same code
with different param settings, all tests had about 46,000 opt steps.
To put things in perspective and show why I am so happy, the
original code was about 2,400 lines. The first time I ran it, on my old backup
computer which I was using as a dedicated optimization machine, it took 7
1/2 hours to run. So then I copied the code and created a shorter version,
removing everything which wasn't absolutley necessary for the optimizer,
and that reduced the run time to 2 1/2 hours. Then I ran this short
version on my faster primary machine and that took 1 1/4 hours, which
is about what I was expecting to see on the new machine.
So today I started by running just ran one
instance on the quad-core - that took only 30 mins and Task
Manager showed it was using just 25% of the total processing
power! Well to make a long story short, I kept adding one instance
at a time, all instances ran in 30 mins and each used up an additional 25%
of the CPU power. In the end, I was easily running 4 simultaneous
instances. This pretty much kept the CPU tached at 100% but all instances ran
fine, all finished in 30 mins and I didn't experience any
problems at all. I was even saving the first ones to spreadsheets while the
final ones were still finishing, wow everything just worked flawlessly!
So, the quad-core can run 4 seperate opts simultaneously in 30 mins,
which averages out to 7 1/2 minutes per opt, which =
10X improvement over running the short code on the fast
machine...
20X improvement over running the short code on the old
dedicated optimization machine...
60X improvement over running the original code on the old
optimization machine... Awesome !!!
To those who were wondering what is the best machine to
get for running AB, it looks to me like quad is the way to go. ( My
machine has an Intel processor, which TJ mentioned should probably work better
than AMD for this stuff )....