topic Two instances of Archicad on multicore CPU in Installation & update

Two instances of Archicad on multicore CPU

alemanda — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:32:27 GMT

Hi,
I opened a new project in archicad 13 64bit on WIN Vista 64bit. Ok.
I opened a big big TW project in another instance of Archicad 13 64bit on the same machine and I noted that the two instances use the same cpu core and not two different cores.
Result
It's impossible to use the instance of archicad with the new (empty) project.
Is it a normal behaviour?
Regards

Re: Two instances of Archicad on multicore CPU

Laszlo Nagy — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 13:08:11 GMT

Try this:
Copy the whole ArchiCAD folder and start a new ArchiCAD instance from that copied folder. In that case the two running ArchiCAD copies may be handled as different applications.
I don't know if that works, this is just an idea.

Re: Two instances of Archicad on multicore CPU

Piotr Dobrowolski — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:54:38 GMT

probably the TW project inside AC has eaten the all avaliable memory - check taks manager - if anything was left.

You probably need memory upgrade (the slowdown is beacuse OS is using swap file frequently)

Best Regards,
Piotr

Re: Two instances of Archicad on multicore CPU

Bricklyne Clarence — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:00:56 GMT

alemanda wrote:
Hi,
I opened a new project in archicad 13 64bit on WIN Vista 64bit. Ok.
I opened a big big TW project in another instance of Archicad 13 64bit on the same machine and I noted that the two instances use the same cpu core and not two different cores.
Result
It's impossible to use the instance of archicad with the new (empty) project.
Is it a normal behaviour?
Regards

Alternatively, if you are using Windows vista or Windows 7, you can assign each instance of ArchiCAD to use separate cores from your taskmanager (under the processes tab; right click-> Set Affinity -> choose the specific core number to use.)

Frankly speaking I don't think it will make that much of a difference since you never really have both instances running in the foreground at the same time. All that this does really, is it locks out some of the cores from each particular instance, (and potentially reduces the performance for each instance due to fewer available cores.)

Typically Windows knows exactly how to assign priorities to separate cores so that you always get optimal performance and functionality with whatever you have running in the foreground, while background (minimized) processes receive lower priority.

The only time I ever assign cores is when I'm rendering using a brute force renderer (like Vray which is set to use all cores to 100% by default) and I still need to use my computer for other tasks at the same time.

Hopefully I understood what you were asking specifically, and hopefully this helps somewhat.

Re: Two instances of Archicad on multicore CPU

Laszlo Nagy — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:23:17 GMT

This Set Affinity stuff is really interesting.
I am sure not many of us knew about that.