So I have been doing some tweaking in PI on my Mac Mini but this will work on Windows/Linux/Mac. I did two simple tweaks
1. I checked to see how many procs / threads I have
Mac Terminal Command. Remember the hw.logicalcpu number
$ sysctl hw.physicalcpu hw.logicalcpu hw.physicalcpu: 6 hw.logicalcpu: 12
Windows PowerShell: Remember the Number of LogicalProcessors
PS> Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Processor | Select-Object -Property Name, Number* Name NumberOfCores NumberOfLogicalProcessors ---- ------------- ------------------------- Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-26... 2 4
Linux Terminal: Remember the Thread Count
$ sudo dmidecode -t 4 | grep -E 'Socket Designation|Count' Socket Designation: CPU1 Core Count: 8 Thread Count: 16 Socket Designation: CPU2 Core Count: 8 Thread Count: 16
Now that we know our threads hop into PixInsight and go to Edit < Global Preferences < Parallel Processing and Threads and change the "Maximum number of read and write threads" to your thread count. Mine was 12 so I have 12 in both boxes
2. Next go to Directories and Networks and setup some more directories for swap anywhere you want. I added 3 after testing 4 and 5 and not making a big difference so 3 was my magic number but I read some other posts people have made as many as 11 based on their beefy hardware.
After making the changes I ran Scripts < Benchmarks < Pixinsight Benchmark and saw the following difference in bench marks after making the changes. The lower numbers are pre changes and then the faster number was after the thread and swap folder changes.
As usual YMMV, best of luck!
