Sieving Speed Questions

[Netbrian]

Hi! I recently joined the SoB sieving effort, immigrating from the regular client. The main reason I did this is because I like the way that the Sieving client displays the results of your efforts, something far more important to me than the possiblity of finding a prime. One issue is that the speeds I'm getting seem a bit slow compared to the speeds acquired by more or less everyone else. I chose to sieve 1,800,000,000,000 to 1,810,000,000,000, and have been getting a rate of about 71000 p per second. One oddity I noticed is that it was drastically slower in certain ranges then it was in others. It started out relatively fast, but at a certain point, it then slowed down a lot it would seem. I run a 1 GHz Pentium 3. Should I be setting my alpha differently? Or is there something else amiss?

[Mystwalker]

I'm using a mobile P3-m 1 GHz scoring ~77Kp/sec. The difference can possibly be explained by the bigger L2 cache (512 KByte instead of 256 KByte).
I found out that that system worked better with a lower alpha value, whereas Duron systems prefer higher alphas. For 1410G-1420G, I had the alpha setting of 2.000, now (2260G) I use 2.500 again.

Hope this helps...