Anyway to increase CPU usage (and thus performance)?

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Level 1

10 points

Anyway to increase CPU usage (and thus performance)?

Probably not possible but I'll ask this question anyway: Is there anyway I can increase the performance of iMovie HD 6 on my Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz MacBook Pro? I should be able to since it appears that iMovie doesn't use all of my CPU's processing power. When I check the activity monitor while iMovie is rendering one of my projects, it shows only 25% CPU usage. Is there a way I can get iMovie to use 100% of my CPU?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.5), 2.4 GHz, 2GB RAM

Posted on Nov 21, 2008 3:30 AM

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Answer 1

Nov 21, 2008 4:44 AM in response to Kenneth Chen

Hi

No there is no such specific command.

YES - by close other activities so there are as little as possibly running in background
eg. Internet, AirPort, Bluetooth etc.

else if nothing else but iMovie (QuickTime - invisibly) and Mac OS is running the
bottle neck is most probably the hard disks access.
Using external USB/USB2 ones is problematic.

I use one FW800 1Tb WD and it performs greatly.

Yours Bengt W

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Answer 2

Kenneth Chen Author

Level 1

10 points

Nov 21, 2008 3:20 PM in response to Carl Salonen

Perhaps increasing memory would increase performance because it might be the hard drive causing the bottleneck. The activity monitor shows there is a lot of disk activity when I render my projects. Maybe if I move an entire project to memory, all those disk reads and writes would be to RAM and not the hard drive and won't slow the rendering process down. Now if I can just find a utility like RAM Disk which allows you to use an area of memory like a hard drive, I can try this theory out...

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Answer 3

Kenneth Chen Author

Level 1

10 points

Nov 21, 2008 7:13 PM in response to Kenneth Chen

Nope, putting my iMovie project onto a RAM Disk made no difference so my hard drive was not the bottleneck.

It seems such a waste of resources when iMovie is using just 40% of my 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo Intel Processor.

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Answer 4

Nov 22, 2008 3:18 AM in response to Bengt Wärleby

Generally, QuickTime (..and iMovie..) seems to use just one CPU at a time. So on a 4-processor machine it appears to swap its work between the four, as in..

..rather than dividing or spreading the work simultaneousl;y between them all, and with none of them reaching 100%.

That's just how the programs are - presently - written.

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Answer 5

Nov 21, 2008 11:56 AM in response to Kenneth Chen

How much RAM have you installed? That might give you the speed bump you're looking for, altho I doubt eevn maxing that out you'd clock in anywhere near 100%.

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Answer 6

Klaus1

Level 9

52,879 points

Nov 22, 2008 2:38 AM in response to Kenneth Chen

Carl was not referring to ram disks but to RAM = memory (which some users confuse with hard disk space).

How much RAM do you have?

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