Any programs out there that can take another program, which doesn’t take up much processing, and just accelerate the action, such that I can run it and wait 10 minutes, and it will be like the program had run 10 hours or whatever?
There certainly isn’t any generalised program to do this, and I don’t think there could ever be, short of something that implements its own, faster version of whatever OS is in use.
There are ways to force an operating system to dedicate more resources to a given task (easier in Linux than Windows), but this will only make it run faster if the program is capable of exploiting those extra resources.
But in a general sense, no - if there was such a thing, why would we ever not use it?
Yes. What you want to do, is go into MS PAINT and use the modulation configurator for your master list of programs. Once you have that up and running, choose the propgram in question as the top priority in the program list. If your program is not in the list, you can manualy install it with the button to the bottom left of that window. Click APPLY once this is done and you should notice a huge difference in your memory usage ratios.
To add to the above; there are certain specific tasks for which it is possible to achieve greater performance by running two copies of the same program at the same time, but usually it is necessary for the program to have been written with that in mind, otherwise the two instances can end up clashing over file locks etc.
Related to this is the idea of running the same process (i.e. part of a program) in multiple threads - for example, a mail server program may be able to retrieve several different messages at the same time, each in its own thread, but this definitely isn’t something you can ‘bolt on’ after the program has been compiled.
If you mean accelerate a program which schedules it’s actions based on time-of-day, then it may be possible to mess with the operating system clock. The down side is that the PC clock would be wrong for all applications. In the old MS DOS days it was possible to re-program the clock chip directly. I have worked on projects where we wrote scheduling routines specifically to be able to be accelerated so we could test a full days processing in a short time. I have no knowledge of an off the shelf solution however.
You can try overclocking the CPU, but you won’t get the 60:1 increase you are suggesting in your OP. Be careful, overclocking is not for the faint of heart.
I have been building my own systems for over a decade and I don’t overclock.
As far as I can figure out what the OP is asking, the only such programs are the OS or programs that hack the OS in some way to give higher priority to your program. I suspect lots of programs that are either disk or memory bound won’t speed up much from over clocking, certainly not to the level the OP desires. Maybe a program that throws out everything else running that is non-essential?
Solaris 10 has a nifty performance monitoring feature, which lets you know where your program is spending its time. Not new, but the first time its been build into an OS to my knowledge. I haven’t used the Solaris 10 one, but I have used others, and finding an inefficient inner loop somewhere is the best way to speed up a program. But I doubt this is what the OP wants.
A 60X performance improvement through parallelization is unlikely except for very special applications running on machines with lots and lots of processors .
Thanks for the responses. Just as a clarification, as I don’t think I made it clear, this impact in speed wouldn’t have had much effect on the processor usage as the program, which is a game, could easily go 60 times faster if it wanted without making a blip in my CPU usage. I was just looking for a way to trick it into doing so.
This gives me an idea. I’m going to invent a little magnet that you can fasten to the ethernet cable to increase your connection speed.
This isn’t a really old game you’re playing with an emulator, are you?
Related to that is what Unix-types call the nice level.
A nice level of -20 is highest priority and 19 is lowest priority. Zero is the default level. You can think of it as 19 is really nice and laid back, and -20 is not at all nice.
Oh, that makes so much more sense, you want the program to “see” time passing 60 times faster. And yes, if the program spends almost all of its time blocked (ie, waiting for an alarm or user event), then I would think you could scrunch 10 hours of processing into 10 minutes. If there is a clever a solution, I would guess that it would involve some sort of emulator?
You can change a program’s processing priority in Windows by going to the Processes tab in Task Manager, right-clicking the desired process, going to Set Priority, and selecting AboveNormal or High. Do not select Realtime; it will usually lock up your system.
Changing the priority will not have any effect on events which depend on the time of day.
Uh, WTF?
I like Power Menu, which gives you this option from a right-click on the menu bar (and the ‘always on top’ option is very useful).
Do you mean change the internal clock/counter the game uses to compute time? For instance - make several simulated days go by faster?
No, nice tells the OS the priority. I was referring to going into the guts of the program to see where it could be sped up. It’s not something I’ve had to do for well over a decade, on today’s machines even stuff written in Perl handle million line files just fine. But I have done it, with good results in the past.
Let me save you a lot of time… ignore all the theoretical crap you will no doubt read on this thread… the answer for your purposes is effectively “no”.
This advice can be very very tricky follow if you don’t do it just right. keithvsstewart, you seem to have forgotten to mention what will happen if the inverse memory usage ratio exceeds the compute spectrum spike just after clicking apply. It happened to me once and I couldn’t find my cat for 3 weeks…
Recharge the flux capacitor & the cat will reappear, although perhaps half-embedded in the wall of a ship.
Wouldn’t it just be easier to ensure the Dilithium crystals are fully charged?