In microsoft.public.money, Art McClinton wrote:

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I suspect Vista vs XP is where the thread dispatcher difference
comes from.

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I have run both Money 2007 and Money Plus on a dual core system running
Windows XP. In both cases I have never seen Money use more than a single
core of the machine. I have run the net worth over all time and it runs in a
single core. I just ran one again on Money Plus with the same result.

I am however able to do other work while it churns away.

In microsoft.public.money, W' wrote:

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I did not have multiple cores until now. With Vista and a Q6600 quad
core processor not overclocked (so far), I can monitor the four
cores off of the graphs on the performance tab of Task Manager. So
far, I see a rise in activity when I do stuff in Money Plus in at
least 3 cores, and so far I have not noticed maxing out any of the
cores. On the other hand, while my file is 88 MB, I have not had
really slow operation. The thing that used to regularly max out my
CPU was exiting while compressing the backup. Now it increases
activity in each core, but no core rose above what I would estimate
to be 50 or 60% for a short time, but the average core during that
time was more like 20 to 30% . Setting Net Worth Over Time to all
dates gave similar activity.

I was undecided whether to get the quad core or the faster-per-core
dual core for about the same price. So far I feel this was the
better choice for me. The benchmarks for doing single things or
playing a game seem to do better on the faster dual core, but I tend
to do less-challenging things concurrently.

Before while the backup was compressing or being written, the
computer would seem unresponsive. Now I can switch to other windows
during that time without apparent impact.

The thing that does seem to max out is the disk drive as the
compressed file is being written. That can be observed on the
Resource Monitor graph.

I agree with the others. Money seems to hog cpu for doing database searchs.
God/Gates only knows what is actually going on, but it behaves like it spends
all the cpu cycles (pinned close to 100% in the task manager) spinning on a
mutex or something. I guess MS programmers in 1995 (or earlier) and since
weren't very good.

"ed" wrote:

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And the same can only **very** rarely be said of the disk storage. For
whatever reason, all indications are that Money runs CPU starved for lots of
its life.

"Chris Cowles" <spam_magnet[at]remove-me-bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:%23zhwZh2wHHA.424[at]TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl...
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"ed" <mr.warmth[at]gmail.com> wrote in message
news:vsWki.4443$lY4.1437[at]trndny07...
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Money frequently has the CPU meter pegged for what you would expect to
be insignificant activity.
--
Chris Cowles
Gainesville, FL

Sorry - as a computer scientist, I can't resist throwing my two cents
into this discussion.

Based on what Money does - I'd say that what we perceive as
computationally expensive activities such as generating reports is
actually not CPU intensive but rather hard-disk intensive. The math of
these reports is trivial, so I'd say much of the work is done in
scanning through the data file looking for relevant data.

Since the bottleneck is reading the data from the disk, having threading
(whether using the same or different CPU) will not help much. In fact,
you'd find that if the entire data was loaded into memory, even a slow
processor from 10 years ago could do the math is a second - it's really
not so much to do. If you want to confirm this, ask money to do one of
these intensive reports, bring up the task manager and check out the %
of the CPU that Money is using. I bet it will not be a large one.

The process of getting updates from the internet on the other hand, is
the perfect candidate for doing in a separate thread while allowing
Money to do its thing. Since the main resource used by the updates is
the network - and nothing else in Money needs the network - it's the
perfect candidate for meaningful parallelization

Comments inline.

"W'" <W[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:E2EC7353-E57C-4B64-911C-E7C8673E5433[at]microsoft.com...
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Spawning a separate process and/or thread and waiting for it to return is
one thing. Threading the application in general is quite another.

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I'd bet against it. It almost certainly has lots of code that dates back to
1995 or so still.

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I don't understand the programming of M2007, of course. But multiple cores
have been out for a while and offer better performance. Money is obviously
multithreaded in that you can download from banks and do something else at
the same time. The compute intensive calculation I described is a natural
place to use multiple cores, because Money locks you out from doing other
things (within Money) when the 'net worth over all time' is running.

The other thought is that perhaps Money is using .Net. If so, surely that
must support multiple processor cores.

To confirm, yes, if Money is running I can do something else outside of
Money with the other core. But generally multitasking applications is not as
useful as a faster Money would be.

That would definitely be the case. I however do not run anything in
competition with Money. You have a valid point that the use of only a
single core of the machine results in not blocking other programs.
"Cal Learner-- MVP" <via_newsgroup[at]please.tnx> wrote in message
news:n40m839uiid4a8j3p50de8nd5t4cg11lnu[at]4ax.com...
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In microsoft.public.money, Art McClinton wrote:

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Do other programs get to run faster without the slowing, while Money
is chugging, that would occur in a single-core processor?


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I have never seen Money 2007 use more than 1 core. Result was when I
upgraded to a dual core machine I am convinced Money runs slower. You are
seeing the same result I have seen with Money 2007. I question the "almost".

"W'" <W[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:391E52FD-78CB-438F-87A1-327ED2FBA9BC[at]microsoft.com...
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Does anyone know if M2007 takes advantage of the multiple cores in modern
computers? As a test I ran M2005 on a C2D. I computed my net worth over all
time and the bugger hogged just one core almost forever. (And the resulting
chart was also very disappointing!)