My PC is taking longer and longer to render videos.

[ImFakeFiction]

I started to notice this problem not to long ago, let's say about 2 months. I render A LOT of videos sometimes 60+ a month at about 15/30 minutes in length. I remember a time when I first got my computer that I could render a 10 minute video out in 5 minutes. Not long ago I realised it was now taking 20 minutes for a 10 minute video and today it's taking 30 minutes!

Does anyone have any idea what this could be? The PC has only just turned 2 years old.

AMD Phenom II x4 955 3.2GHz
8GB RAM at 800Mhz
Ati Radeon 4870

The pc was only recently formatted as well and it doesn't feel sluggish at all when doing normal tasks like browsing the internet, photoshop and the process of editing videos.

This wont be a problem for long as I'm getting my i7 2700k in early February and I've got everything else already but it's really crucial I sort this problem out until then.

If you can offer any suggestions at all, please do, it would mean a lot,

Thank you.

 

[ImFakeFiction]

Thought I should add that the CPU is running at 45 C (load).

 

[Engima]

How about getting fast RAM? You'll probably need the max your board can hold for fastest rendering.

 

[Tamz_msc]

Is the CPU stuck at Cool n' Quiet frequencies? Use CPU-Z to check if that is the case.

 

[silverliquicity]

as a quick fix, try overclocking the cpu? i got 3.7 on stock cooler

 

[13thmonkey]

How is the swap space set up, as a single contiguous static lump or is it system managed. My thought is thgat rendering might use a lot memory and therefore page file, and that this is now heavily fragmented, and has been getting more fragmented over time.

You are correct something is different about the system now, compared to then.

 

[ImFakeFiction]

@Tamz -
Here is a look at my CPU in CPU-Z http://i.imgur.com/4P5Gw.png

@silverliquicity -
My pc is only on a 350w PSU making overclocking a pain.

@13th -
Static lump. My pc has only moved on to a new hard drive (Samsung HD103SJ Spinpoint F3 1TB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 32MB Cache) about 4 months ago. Would the constant rendering>deleting>rendering fragment my drive? I've got a spare WD 1TB plugged in which has no use at the moment and I just tried rendering a video to it and it's still just as slow.


One more thing -
On CPU-Z my ram shows it's only running at 400Mhz. I have no idea how to work BIOS to be honest so I don't know how to change this to the actual speed (800).

Picture of my memory: http://i.imgur.com/lnxDC.png

This is my board: http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=K10N78D
http://i.imgur.com/lnxDC.png

This is the ram I own: Crucial Ballistix 4 GB : 2 x 2 GB Memory - DIMM 240-pin - 800 MHz ( PC2-6400 ) and I'm unsure of the other 4GB although it's still 800MHz.

Thanks for all the help guys.

 

[13thmonkey]

what i'm suggesting is that the page file specifically is fragmented. Is your page file set to auto, or set to a single size of page file like 9216 - 9216.
control panel > system > system > advanced > performance > advanced.

Thats one of the few things that would change over time, although i'd be surprised its having that big an effect. the other options are:
-that you are doing something different, rendering to better quality, higher compression, bigger resolution, different starting file type, different sarting file content (could a render of something that is visually more complex take longer, i.e. more eyecandy on) etc.
-that your machine is slower either because settings have changed, unlikely (I think you'll find that 400Mhz ddr2 is running at 800 due to the x2 multiplier inherent in ddr2).
-that your machine is slower because its doing more elsewhere, unlikely to the degree you are talking about unless its been botnetted? not sure, i'd have thought they'd be more subtle in thier cpu usage.
-that your machine is slower for hardware reasons - is it full of dust causing the cpu to throttle a lot? again i doubt it would ever get this bad, what are your cou temps whilst doing this rendering?

 

[Guest]

Main reasons for performance degradation are...

1) Hard Drive fragmentation (I think it's playing a major part in your case too!
Rendering does fragment HDDs a lot)
2) OS system file corruption.
3) Corrupted/junk Registry entries left after software/game uninstalls.
4) Unnecessary services running in background, go to Control Panel, type "services" in the top-right search pane, and click on "Local Services" from the results that pop up. You can view a description when you click on the service and if safe, just disable it. If you're not too sure about it, set it to manual. NEVER change any value if you don't understand the description as it may lead to disruption of the corresponding service, e.g. internet/network, backup operations, auto updates, printing, etc.
5) Viruses. If you don't have a good licensed version, purchase a Kaspersky suite, it offers great protection and is damn fast. Though, I feel Avira is a bit more faster but Kaspersky is more trusted. If you'd like to use a free one, get Avira, it's the best free Antivirus, though you won't get online, scam/phishing protection, etc.

As you have 8 GB RAM, despite being DDR2, you can afford to keep pagefile as low as 1 GB or even under. This will keep more OS files in RAM and speed up operations. Though, never disable pagefile completely or allocate a very low size, because when your 8 GB RAM, unlikely though, gets filled completely, and there's no pagefile allocated to keep the excess data in memory, the app/system will crash due to lack of memory.

 

[Guest]

Forgot to mention that for defragmenting, use Auslogics Disk Defrag. Windows Defragmenter is just fine, but it's too slow. Since I started using Auslogics Disk Defrag, I haven't switched back.

 

[ImFakeFiction]

@13th My page file is set to auto. As for the video quality it's been more or less the same since I started doing the videos so I'm sure it's not that. I don't add effects to the videos either so again I don't think it's that. As for my pc being part of a botnet or containing a virus I'm 99.9% certain it's not that. I cleaned it out not long ago and the cpu was pretty clean. Whilst rendering the cpu is at about 48c on the stock cooler. Thank you for your help.


@TheKnight I checked my hard drive and it was only 1% fragmented using the tool built into Windows. I've done registry checks and deleted all errors. I installed Windows on my new hard drive about 4 months ago and don't have a lot of programs installed and rarely download anything 'dodgy'. As for the services I use a program called Game Booster 3 to close all unnecessary processes and services whenever I boot up my pc. As for virus software I use 'ESET NOD 32 Antivirus' and have had no issues with viruses. Thanks for the help, if there's anything else you can think of please let me know, thank you.

 

[13thmonkey]

@13th My page file is set to auto. As for the video quality it's been more or less the same since I started doing the videos so I'm sure it's not that. I don't add effects to the videos either so again I don't think it's that. As for my pc being part of a botnet or containing a virus I'm 99.9% certain it's not that. I cleaned it out not long ago and the cpu was pretty clean. Whilst rendering the cpu is at about 48c on the stock cooler. Thank you for your help.

because you are on auto the page file will shrink and grow with load, so set it to a constant value, i.e. min = max = a large value, I disagree with the concept of shrinking it unless you have an awful lot of ram, it'll only use what it needs to use, so set it at 1xram or 1.5 x ram, i like mulitples of 1024MB, but thats not needed really.

48 is not too hot. Other than the above I have no more ideas.

 

[ImFakeFiction]

because you are on auto the page file will shrink and grow with load, so set it to a constant value, i.e. min = max = a large value, I disagree with the concept of shrinking it unless you have an awful lot of ram, it'll only use what it needs to use, so set it at 1xram or 1.5 x ram, i like mulitples of 1024MB, but thats not needed really.

48 is not too hot. Other than the above I have no more ideas.

Sorry for not understanding you here but I'm here (picture below) and I have no idea what I should put. Could you possibly tell me what you would suggest putting in? Thanks again man, I appreciate you taking the time to help me.

 

[13thmonkey]

Sorry I can't see the picture, but pick your best HDD, if you've got more than one, set the min and max to a value, 8192 would be my preference, hit set. go the other other drives and set none and press set, apply this, and you'll reboot.

like I said its a long shot, but I believe that a fixed large page file (in the days of cheap HDD capacity), is better than a variable one for rotating storage.

If you look at task manager, performance, resource monitor, then the 'hard faults' that you see in the memory tab are the times that windows has the wrong thing in memory nad has to hit the page file. Having no page file means it has to hit the disk anyway.