1.8

Performance Packs). For advice please contact your local sales office (see Objectif Lune's
Contact page).
Engine configuration
In PrintShop Mail Connect, Merge engines load data and merge that data to a template (this is
called Content Creation). The Weaver engine creates the output (Output Creation).
Configuring these engines to match the hardware configuration is probably the fastest and most
effective way to improve Connect's performance.
Number of Merge engines
When first installed, PrintShop Mail Connect is configured to use 1 Merge engine. A Merge
engine will run mostly single-threaded. To benefit from modern multi-core systems it is
recommended to run several Merge engines in parallel.
As a rule of thumb, you will want to run as many Merge engines as the system has cores. The
print statistics message dialog shows both the number of Merge engines and Cores. However,
modern hardware typically has both full cores and hyper-threading or logical cores. Both are
counted as cores in this dialog, but the logical cores should not be counted as a full core when
determining how many Merge engines to use. As a guideline, count logical cores for only 25%-
50% of a full core.
For example: on an Intel i7 CPU that comes with 4 cores and 4 additional hyper-threading
cores, Windows Task Manager will show 4 cores and 8 logical processors on its performance
tab. On a CPU like this, 5 or 6 Merge engines can be configured to run in parallel.
It is advised not to configure more Merge engines than can be backed by actual processing
power. This adds overhead while not adding processing power.
To configure the number of Merge engines:
1.
Select Window > Preferences... from the menu; under Scheduling, select Scheduling -
Merge engine.
2.
Set Local engines launched to a number appropriate for your system.
3.
Initially, you can set Parellel engines per job to the same number as the Local engines
launched, for both medium and large jobs (see "Job size limits" on the facing page,
below).
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