Optane memory and CAT tools? Thread poster: Luca Tutino
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Luca Tutino 
Italy
Member (2002)
English to Italian
+ ...
I wonder if anybody ever tried the effect of adding Optane memory to work on large files and large TMs/TBs in CAT tools like Trados or mQ. As far as I understood, in theory, this might be the fastest option for continuous repeated access to the same files often happening with those tools. If yes, will you please share your config and experience?
| | | | DZiW (X)
Ukraine
English to Russian
+ ...
| May be for HDD; hardly for SDD | Apr 6, 2020 |
Luca, they market 3D XPoint IOM for home users as both a rather expensive fast tiny system drive and a hardware smartboost-like hybrid accelerator. The recommended requirements are i7+ on intel200+ chipset under Win10x64 only, alas. While x20-x30 increase may seem worthy for slow HDDs, it takes 32+Gb IOM model to cover block and file caching. Furthermore, it shows little use for recent SDDs, handicapping the backup (I use Acronis) and having its overhead: So why paying to fix something that works fine? IMO.
I prefer laptops with 512+GB SSD or some 256GB SSD for system + some 2TB HDD for data, and often replace my caddies, but I don’t feel like I need such a transparent caching. Of course, I used to play quite successfully with PrimoCache/Primo Ramdisk, SoftPerfect RAM Disk, and many other paid and free RAMdrive/RAMcache solutions, but no need now. May be worth checking though, investigating the hardware counterparts too.
However, if you can have IOM or something else for 7-14 days free testing, just give it a try for sure. Also DO backup first, and mind the UPS for the desktop PC!
Cheers
| | | | Lincoln Hui
Hong Kong
Local time: 20:35
Member
Chinese to English
+ ...
Optane HDDs are still slower than SSDs. Optane SSDs don't show much of a difference compared to standard, high-end SSDs, except in price. There's a reason why Optane drives are pretty much dead in the market.
And please, let's not pretend CAT tools are at the cutting-edge of computing applications. Your "large" files and "targe TM/TBs" are maybe a handful of 30-50MB files, perhaps a couple hundred MB if you really tried. When we talk about drive performance we're talking about thous... See more Optane HDDs are still slower than SSDs. Optane SSDs don't show much of a difference compared to standard, high-end SSDs, except in price. There's a reason why Optane drives are pretty much dead in the market.
And please, let's not pretend CAT tools are at the cutting-edge of computing applications. Your "large" files and "targe TM/TBs" are maybe a handful of 30-50MB files, perhaps a couple hundred MB if you really tried. When we talk about drive performance we're talking about thousands of accesses every minute (or second), or about files that are 30-50 GB. What applications are you running that need an I/O of 500 Mbps? CAT tools fall within "light to moderately demanding office applications". They aren't in the same zip code as photo/video editing, 3D graphics or even live streaming, the sort of applications that high-end workstations are being marketed for.
[Edited at 2020-04-07 07:01 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 13:35
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
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Rolf Keller
Germany
Local time: 13:35
English to German
| Invest in much RAM instead of in a fast disk | Apr 7, 2020 |
Luca Tutino wrote:
continuous repeated access to the same files often happening with those tools.
TMs are accessed via indexes, so the speed of the mass storage is'nt very important - except when you perform certain special tasks that read/write whole files in one run (e. g. sorting, converting, im-/exporting, ...).
| | | | Luca Tutino
Italy
Member (2002)
English to Italian
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | Beyond the basics | Apr 7, 2020 |
Thank you all. At the moment I have an old notebook (3rd gen I3, 9 years old this month) which I upgraded right away with max RAM (8GB) and 3 years later with a 1T SSD (huge improvement, despite the slow notebook SATA). Surprisingly, this system is still working very well, mostly, during actual translation and most of the time.
But, especially with Trados, when I try to do something remotely "special" with large files - like importing 130Mb TMX files received from an important clie... See more Thank you all. At the moment I have an old notebook (3rd gen I3, 9 years old this month) which I upgraded right away with max RAM (8GB) and 3 years later with a 1T SSD (huge improvement, despite the slow notebook SATA). Surprisingly, this system is still working very well, mostly, during actual translation and most of the time.
But, especially with Trados, when I try to do something remotely "special" with large files - like importing 130Mb TMX files received from an important client, "upgrading" a 4Gb SDLTM, but also unexpectedly with apparently less demanding tasks - I am often confronted with long waits. An entire night might not suffice. And hitting Cancel leads to an even longer wait, or to an inevitable forced reboot.
Now, I do not want to push my luck too far, so I am looking for options - probably a silent desktop (if we will ever be able to travel again my old notebook might still be of help for some time) if I can find one good one at a fair price, possibly DIY, considering that I am already working with external display, kb and mouse and I hope I can count on my large SSD for a longer while.
I understood that the bottleneck is in the CAT tool architecture itself but, as I am under the impression that these tools cannot even take full advantage of fast CPUs (ot btw should try Ryzen or stick to recent gen Core?), I was wondering if some kind of Optane memory might be placed between a large RAM and a reasonably fast CPU and if this could help speeding up CAT processing and might cost less than a 9th or 10th generation CPU. ▲ Collapse
| | | | DZiW (X)
Ukraine
English to Russian
+ ...
Luca, as you may know, the Core i3 is a low-end/starter segment. A 2011 model must be the second generation Sandy Bridge marked as i3-2xxx on LGA1155. If your motherboard and BIOS allow a compatible upper-class CPU, I would discard i7--unless used as a desktop--and go for i5 Ivy Bridge, making it a fine line between performance and battery life. However, some vendors still use low-voltage DDR3L and DDR3U memory, switching two memory banks to lower speed. Besides, budget notebooks often lacked M.... See more Luca, as you may know, the Core i3 is a low-end/starter segment. A 2011 model must be the second generation Sandy Bridge marked as i3-2xxx on LGA1155. If your motherboard and BIOS allow a compatible upper-class CPU, I would discard i7--unless used as a desktop--and go for i5 Ivy Bridge, making it a fine line between performance and battery life. However, some vendors still use low-voltage DDR3L and DDR3U memory, switching two memory banks to lower speed. Besides, budget notebooks often lacked M.2 port and had SATA2 port instead of SATA3, which may be okay for HDD@5400/@7200 even with small buffer, but is a serious drawback for SSD. Furthermore, a clumsy admin-schoolboy could install the HDD not in AHCI, but an IDE-compatible mode. Anyway, such hardware is pretty cheap now, yet investing in the outdated hardware is rather ambiguous solution. (By the way, when the laptop was maintained properly? Most CPUs/HDDs throttle down when overheated or damaged. Have your backups ready, so an hour stress-test shall tell.)
If an application is too slow, it's high time to change the app!
As far as querying-updating-modifying is a typical server role, I believe that besides software, it’s the media bottleneck, so you need to optimize it: ~64K cluster size having Indexing, Last Access time, auto-size swapfile and other unnecessary settings/services/apps adding to the overhead disabled. Also it makes sense to clean left-overs (CCleaner; yet mind the credentials and cookies), run chkdsk to resolve possible filesystem issues and then Victoria 5.27 or alike to fix possible hardware problems.
Just try to import or export a huge TM while checking the performance and parameters, so you could find the weak link or a few.
[i]Googling for XXXX vs YYYY often shows interesting matches with diagrams and numbers, but it's practical use what makes the big difference. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Luca Tutino
Italy
Member (2002)
English to Italian
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | I am not considering ugrading further my 9 years old notebook :)) That would be crazy! | Apr 7, 2020 |
DZiW wrote:
If an application is too slow, it's high time to change the app!
I'd like very much to ditch some of those apps but, if you also work as a translator and not only as an interpreter, you will certainly know that this would not be efficient, mostly because of compatibility problems with some new file format versions -- which almost look like made for the sake of making sure we keep using and updating those apps.
DZiW wrote:
...Most CPUs/HDDs throttle down when overheated or damaged. Have your backups ready, so an hour stress-test shall tell.)...
You are right in most respects, except that I would advise against using the rather messy sw CCleaner. Of course, I use checkdisk when necessary, keep an eye on my SSD with Samsung Magician and other appropriate software, I do not have an HD installed, I keep my 2 external backups updated every few hours (incremental) and every week (full image), I monitor temperatures and speeds, I switched off those unnecessary or SSD damaging services, etc... and I hope I did not incur in all schoolboy traps as you seem to be presuming. I think that the very good general behavior of my Asus X52F proves that I am maintaining it quite well.
I did not know Victoria but I am not sure it would make sense to go beyond Magician, considering that, according to Process Explorer, slow Trados tasks show a very low amount of disk reads and writes compared to other app tasks. I also noticed that people with much more recent and expensive hardware, including recent generation i7 and fast RAM, keep complaining about some Trados tasks taking a disproportionate amount of time, similar to my experience, even with files smaller than mines. Sometimes, with such newer machines, they still find it difficult and slow to complete tasks that I can perform easily.
But, as I said, my machine is now too old to be upgraded further and my question is placed in view of building a newer machine, and I just want to be sure that after doing it I will not get confronted with the usual problems again. This is why I was asking if I should also start considering Octane memories as a possible more efficient solution than last generation i7 CPUs. In essence,
among other things, I am wondering if -- apart from maximizing size and speed of RAM, which is obvious -- there is some additional way to convince CATs, and Trados in particular, to perform their writes and reads more frequently and effectively.
DZiW wrote:
[i]Googling for XXXX vs YYYY often shows interesting matches with diagrams and numbers, but it's practical use what makes the big difference.
How would you apply exactly this to my question?
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Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 13:35
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
Luca Tutino wrote:
But, especially with Trados, when I try to do something remotely "special" with large files - like importing 130Mb TMX files received from an important client, "upgrading" a 4Gb SDLTM, but also unexpectedly with apparently less demanding tasks - I am often confronted with long waits.
I have a rather recent desktop computer, Ryzen 5, with 16 GB of RAM and a PCIe SSD. So, yesterday, because I was bored, I took one of them TAUS corona TMs and did some conversions on it using Trados, etc. The TM in TMX format was 150 MB, with 700 000 TUs. It took Trados 2 hours to import that TMX file into an SDLTM file, and the resulting SDLTM file was 1.6 GB.
(I also, because I was feeling lucky, converted the original TM to a two-column table, i.e. 1 400 000 segments and with about half of the segments having 95-99% matches with the converted TM, but Trados was unable to complete the pre-translation... ran out of memory, it said, fortunately after trying only half a hour.)
So, if you have a 9 year old computer, then I don't think adding Optane memory (or any memory) would do anything for you. The simple fact is that Trados was never really designed to deal with very large files.
[Edited at 2020-04-08 08:59 GMT]
| | | | Luca Tutino
Italy
Member (2002)
English to Italian
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | Very interesting | Apr 8, 2020 |
Thank you Samuel! This is the most detailed reply about speed and Trados with recent systems I ever received on the subject. Great to know that you are happy with a Ryzen. Two hours might not be light speed, but it is much faster than my notebook. Can you please also tell me if you were able to leave that task in the background and carry other work or activities in the meantime?
On the other side the Out of Memory message during pretranslation despite 16Gb RAM is not good news. Stra... See more Thank you Samuel! This is the most detailed reply about speed and Trados with recent systems I ever received on the subject. Great to know that you are happy with a Ryzen. Two hours might not be light speed, but it is much faster than my notebook. Can you please also tell me if you were able to leave that task in the background and carry other work or activities in the meantime?
On the other side the Out of Memory message during pretranslation despite 16Gb RAM is not good news. Strangely enough, this never happened to me, but I think I never had a 1,4 million segments in a single translation file. Did you have memory swapping on disk when necessary active at the time? I know there is a debate about avoiding RAM swapping with SSDs, but I have it on and never had problems in almost 6 years.
Samuel Murray wrote:
So, if you have a 9 year old computer, then I don't think adding Optane memory (or any memory) would do anything for you.
[Edited at 2020-04-08 08:59 GMT]
Of course! I must have expressed myself very badly: I never thought about upgrading further my old notebook: now I am just starting to study my options for a new desktop.
[Edited at 2020-04-08 14:57 GMT] ▲ Collapse
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