Research Assignment

Research

For my research I chose to look at the two different workflows of experiment 1 and 2 from a different perspective. Instead of viewing them from a human interaction point-of-view, I thought about the ‘machines’ interaction with each workflow. This led to my notion of the effects of each workflow on the computers resources, i.e. CPU usage, memory usage etc. Therefore my research question is:

Which workflow is more resource intensive?

Below is a video which presents the research I undertook to answer my hypothesis. Essentially I analysed each workflow with windows ‘Task Manager’ which visually presents the computers resource usage in real-time. It provides a clear indication of important aspects of the used machine including the CPU usage, Physical Memory Usage, and Page File usage(HDD), which are the variables taken into consideration for this research assignment.

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As seen in the video, multiple values were taken from task manager over time to produce an average CPU, Memory, and Page File usage for each workflow. Different aspects of each workflow required varying amounts of resources; however as a whole workflow 2 definitely produced higher values, thus showing to be more resource intensive. Workflow 1 did not require as much processing power as workflow 2, while PF usage was considerably higher in workflow 2. This means that the processes in workflow 2 required more memory, hence requiring assistance from the hardrive. These results actually reflected the complexity of the software being used. Solid Works and 3DS Max are evidently not naturally simple programs like Sketchup, therefore reinforcing the conclusion that the second workflow is more resource intensive.

Task Manager

Above is a image of the task manager, which was used to analyse the workflows. In the top section an instantaneous value (left) and values over time graph (right) of the CPU is present. Below that is the same for PF usage. In the top right box of the lower section information about the total physical memory, and available (not being used) pysical memory is shown.

Sketchup Modelling