On a machine with 2 cores, if I start 2 separate instances of FME Desktop from the Start menu, and run a Workspace in each, does this use parallel processing i.e. does each copy of FME Desktop use a separate core?
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Parallel processing - does this happen if I start 2 copies of FME Desktop?
+8- Contributor
Best answer by david_r
I wouldn't call it parallel processing in the context of FME, but yes, the operating system will usually start a new process (such as fme.exe) on one of the least loaded cores. This is usually fully handled by the operating system, but it is sometimes possible to override which core is used, e.g. http://www.wikihow.com/Choose-Which-Core-the-Application-Will-Run-On-for-Windows
As you can see, this is not something handled by FME itself.
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- Best Answer
I wouldn't call it parallel processing in the context of FME, but yes, the operating system will usually start a new process (such as fme.exe) on one of the least loaded cores. This is usually fully handled by the operating system, but it is sometimes possible to override which core is used, e.g. http://www.wikihow.com/Choose-Which-Core-the-Application-Will-Run-On-for-Windows
As you can see, this is not something handled by FME itself.
+8- Contributor
I wouldn't call it parallel processing in the context of FME, but yes, the operating system will usually start a new process (such as fme.exe) on one of the least loaded cores. This is usually fully handled by the operating system, but it is sometimes possible to override which core is used, e.g. http://www.wikihow.com/Choose-Which-Core-the-Application-Will-Run-On-for-Windows
As you can see, this is not something handled by FME itself.
Thanks for the clarification. I sometimes run 2 different Workspaces at the same time and wondered if they would impact on each other or not. Maybe not in terms of CPU then but RAM, disk could be an issue if they both wanted it all.
+8- Contributor
Yes, definitely, several fully occupied cores will have to battle for all the resources, memory, disk, network, etc, but that battle is far outside the scope of FME :-) You can google "von neumann bottleneck" for lots of interesting stuff on this topic, if you're curious.
I've monitored CPU in the Performance tab of Task Manager when running a Workspace and firing up a second instance of Workbench. In the Affinity setting, both cores are ticked.
With one Workspace running that processes data straight from Reader to Writer, the CPU hovers around 50% but drops and fluctuates more when the second Workbench is launched (but no Workspace run in it).
If I repeat the test, but with a Workspace running that has a couple of transformers in it, again the CPU hovers around 50%, but when I launch the second Workbench, CPU goes up to 100% and drops back to 50% once Workbench has opened (again, I didn't run a Workspace in this).
I haven't played around with the Affinity settings.