Sunday, January 08, 2006

Why is the PC running so slow?

At work we created a new VMWare image of the latest release of our Financial Software. Since it was required for a demo at our KL office, we needed to compress it prior to sending over the Internet to them. Since it was over 4GB, we used WinRAR to compress each virtual disk. It took forever and transferring via scp was just as bad. The cpu was the bottleneck, not because of the compression but the virus scanner scanning the VMWare image :-(. Morale of the story disable scanning for your VM image directories.

I guess a sign of times, were there are more background tasks running than "real" work being done in the foreground. And please, no comments about moving our work desktops to Linux or buying Mac's. Our server components are developed under Linux and run under most versions of Unix and Linux, but all our customers use M$ operating systems for the clientside. So we need to as well.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The joke used to be that the reason Microsoft released new versions of Office and Windows was to soak up the extra CPU cycles on newer processors.

That task has now been taken up by the virus scanners.

-Adam V.
http://adamv.com/