Will GPG use Dual Processors under Windows ?

Tue Nov 19 19:38:02 2002

Other thoughts:

Make sure you know what your bottleneck is before you commit large amounts
of cash. Although given your system specs (P3 600Mhz) you will undoubtedly
see a great improvement going to anything current, you should consider if
you are memory or disk bound as well. A 2+ Ghz processor will still choke
with not enough RAM, and a slow disk will kill the whole thing regardless of
CPU or memory.

Are you committed to Windows? If you are looking for a fast box to do
compression/encryption, you might consider other platforms: Linux or OpenBSD
don't carry the overhead that Windows does and should allow your system to
be more dedicated to the task at hand. You could easily do some minor
scripting to make use of multiple processors also if your data allows. You
could "split" the file and handle each piece separately (also a decent way
to deal with insufficient memory) for example. 

Later,
Jim

-----Original Message-----
From: Jason S. Mantor [mailto:jmantor@nycap.rr.com]
Sent: Monday, November 18, 2002 11:41 PM
To: David Shaw; gnupg-users@gnupg.org
Subject: RE: Will GPG use Dual Processors under Windows ?

Looks like I'll have to live with it.
The industry specs I need to adhere to require
compression (using gpg) and 3des.  I am intrigued
by the idea of running multiple instances of
GPG on different processors, though.

		Thanks again,
		-JSM

-----Original Message-----
From: gnupg-users-admin@gnupg.org [mailto:gnupg-users-admin@gnupg.org]On
Behalf Of David Shaw
Sent: Monday, November 18, 2002 8:06 PM
To: gnupg-users@gnupg.org
Subject: Re: Will GPG use Dual Processors under Windows ?

On Mon, Nov 18, 2002 at 03:34:02PM -0500, Jason_Mantor@hesc.com wrote:
>       We're designing the next iteration of our encrypted file
transmission
> systems and we're anticipating the need to encrypt and decrypt files that
> could be as large as 10 gigabytes in size using GnuPG.  Our tests indicate
> that it could take an hour to process a file that size on some of our
> slower hardware (Single P3 600Mhz).  It seems to be bound by processor
> speed.  (Our tests on smaller files so that disk speeds and even ramdisks
> don't make any difference.)  Does the official exe for Windows take
> advantage of multiple processors ?

It does not.  There are some things you might try to speed up the
process, though.  First of all, if you turn off compression, you save
some CPU time, though at the cost of a larger file size.  Secondly,
choose your ciphers with care.  Don't use 3DES if you can possibly
avoid it.  While it is the most highly thought of in terms of
security, it is also the slowest cipher by far.

Note that you can take advantage of multiple CPUs if you split up the
work intelligently - for example, say you want to encrypt and
compress.  If you have GnuPG encrypt, and a different program compress
then you can keep both CPUs busy.  Also, if you break your 10 gig file
into 2 5 gig files, then you can run two instances of GnuPG at once.

David

--
   David Shaw  |  dshaw@jabberwocky.com  |  WWW http://www.jabberwocky.com/
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   "There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX.
      We don't believe this to be a coincidence." - Jeremy S. Anderson

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