Multitasking Scenario 2: File Compression

For our next test, we simulated what would happen if we performed two disk intensive tasks at the same time: zipping a file while importing a 260MB PST file into Outlook 2003.  

We ran the same Firefox and iTunes tasks from the last test again, and then did the following:

1) Open Outlook.
2) Start importing 260MB PST.
3) Start WinRAR.
4) Archive 130MB test file.

WinRAR remained the application in focus during this test.

Here, we looked at two metrics: how long it took WinRAR to compress our test file, and how many emails were imported into Outlook during the time WinRAR was archiving.  Let's have a look at the results:

Here, we see that all of the CPUs performed relatively similar to one another, but now let's talk about how many emails were imported.  The non-HT Pentium 4 imported around 500 emails, while the HT P4 EE imported around 1700 emails by the time WinRAR was done.  Neither of those are even close to the performance of the dual core chips, which each imported over 3000 emails in the same 40 seconds.  The single core Athlon 64 FX-55 also only imported around 400 emails. 

Our second test shows us that the performance of a dual core solution comes in all shapes and sizes. In this case, our foreground task took the same amount of time in almost all cases, but what was done in the background varied significantly.