Give all possible resources to a program

Question

I created a program in C# to work with 2.5 million records in Oracle Express (local instance), parse/split those records and create an additional 5 million records.

I added some code to print times on the screen and it seems fairly fast. It is doing all the processing for 1K records every 9 seconds. Which means it takes more than 6 hours to finish.

Now, with Task Manager I can see the program is using 6% of CPU (max) and around 50MB of memory. I understand the OS, and Oracle itself need resources to operate but..... is there a way to tell this little program "hey, it's ok, go ahead and use at least 50% of CPU, there are 4GB of RAM so knock yourself out"?

Note: One of the reasons I'm using a local instance with Oracle Express is to reduce the network bottleneck. Also I might not run this process quite often but I was intrigued to see if this was at all possible.

Please forgive my noobness,

Thanks!

Answer 1

The operating system will give your program all the resources it needs, the reason your process is not consuming all the CPU is probably because it's waiting for the IO sub system more than the processor.

If you want to see if you can consume more CPU cycles try writing a program that runs a short infinite loop as fast as possible and you will see the difference in CPU usage.

Answer 2

A number of thoughts, not really answers I guess, but.

1. You could up the priority of the applications thread, however, its possible that the code maybe less efficient than you think, so..

Have you run a profiler on it?

1. If its currently a single threaded app, you could look to see if you could parse it in batches and therefore run them in parallel.

2. Without knowing a lot of detail of the splitting of records, is it possible to off hand that more to oracle to do? eg, would matter less about network etc or local or otherwise.

3. If you're apps drawing/updating a screen or UI then it will almost certainly slow the progress of the work down. An example. I ran an app which sorted about 10k emails into around 250k lines into a database, if I added an item to a listbox each line the time went from short to rediculous eg, crash out got bored. So, again, offloading to a thread to do the work with as few UI updates to do as possible can help.