john-users - Re: JTR use only 50% of my process on windows

Openwall Project		/home Owl JtR Pro crypt pam_passwdqc tcb phpass scanlogd popa3d msulogin / Linux BIND / advisories presentations / services donations / wordlists passwords / community lists wiki CVSweb mirrors signatures
bringing security into open environments

Order Openwall Wordlists CD (20+ languages) with delivery worldwide or download

[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [month] [year] [list]

Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 09:21:29 -0500
From: RB <aoz.syn@...il.com>
To: john-users@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: JTR use only 50% of my process on windows

> ... 50% unused process ressource.
> I'm using win xp SP2 with P4 3.4 ghz HT.

John is a single-threaded program; hence it will only ever use up to
50% of the processor resources on a "dual" processor machine.  Search
for back posts about people asking for multi-processing if your next
thought is to do so.

Hyperthreading was a poor early answer by Intel to AMD's multi-core
processors.  It virtually 'splits' your processor in two, allowing two
threads to think they're each consuming an entire processor, whereas
in reality they're sharing the resources of one.  IMHO, HT is
worthless; I like to call it hardware-enforced preemption, as it makes
everything slower to make stuff 'feel' more responsive.  In your case,
50% utilization means that John is actually maxing out the processor.

-- 
To unsubscribe, e-mail john-users-unsubscribe@...ts.openwall.com and reply
to the automated confirmation request that will be sent to you.