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LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: New Performance Panoramas A Memory Address Space Crash Course System Configuration Disk Caching? System Memory Density Impact WoW, WinXP and WinXP-64 Conclusion Discuss this article here:
Panorama Factory and the $64-bit Question What's in a Benchmark...?
(Review by MS, September 2, 2004)

The Benchmarks

We were looking at a total of four different (albeit related) benchmarks that were used by Panorama Factory. The first two benchmarks were a rather Gargantuan stitching of 22 pictures to generate a 360 degree panorama. Each picture used was approximately 190 MB in file size, meaning that the entire amount of data to be processed was in the order of ~4.2GB. However, since there was some overlap between the different images, the total size of the “blended” file was about 3.1 GB – coincidentally just a hare’s ass above the limitations of Windows2000 Server.

     

Left: Partial view of the stitched and rendered scene (bottom) with two tumbnails of the entire 360 degree surround view on top. Note the picture dimensions of 41262 x 4191 pixels which, in .png format occupy 3.11 GB of memory space (shown as page file size in the right picture).

The individual benchmarks are scripted to run without user intervention and the first two options will attempt to run the 22 picture behemoth crafted to show the insufficiencies of the 32-bit memory addressing with the result that the 32-bit application running either in a WoW (32-bit Windows on 64-bit Windows) or in native WindowsXP will fail and exit with the predictable “out of memory” message. According to schedule the out of memory error occurs at the point where the pagefile usage jumps from 1.6 GB above the 2GB limit. Using the 64-bit application, the benchmark finishes on schedule, however, it is necessary to note that the system will temporarily become completely unresponsive to keyboard and mouse, and even the“Performance” window in Windows Task Manager will freeze completely. The total recall of all system resources to manage the more than 3 GB of data being processed is, however, only temporary and the system will recover from catatonia after a few minutes.

           

Left: stitch obtained from four individual images. Center: we monitored up to 1.6GB of virtual memory usage in the 32-bit application which was no problem at all, however, as soon as the point was reached where the 64-bit version of Panorama Factory showed a jump to 2 GB of virtual memory usage, the system faulted and generated an "Out Of Memory" error message as predicted (right picture). Note that even after Panorama Factory was terminated by a fault handler execution, the page file usage remained at about 1.5 GB.

Tests 3 and 4 execute a reduced workload consisting of four pictures only that are stitched together. It is still a formidable amount of memory that is commanded in this case, moreover, some of the data appear to stay resident within the virtual memory on the hard disk since consecutive runs of the same task will see some substantial increase in performance, at least as long as only 1 MB of memory is used. Increasing the total amount of system memory decreases the variation between runs to no more than about 5%, regardless of whether the system is rebooted in between or not. Since we are interested in the difference between 64-bit computing mode rather than in the impact of different caching strategies, we ran the main bulk of benchmarks with 2 GB of memory. However, we also show some data reflecting the increase in performance stemming from higher system memory density as well as some numbers reflecting the variability between results with 1 GB of memory only.

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