I know the GUI sucks and most people are not using it but for the people that do here are a few things that I have learned in order to optimize plotting on it and set it and forget it. Other solutions are better but here are a few tips I learned.
Step 1 : Select plot count and plot size. Plot count is the number of plots that are going to line up to be completed sequentially not concurrently. Putting 100 here will not start 100 plots at once but 1 plot at a time until all 100 are finished. If you are plotting with the GUI K-32 is what you are most likely going to want.
Step 2. : Do NOT select plot in parallel. Select Add Plot to queue. Than click advanced options. Depending on you cpu, ram and SSD setup you are going to select ram amount and thread amount. My setup is 10850k, 64 gb ram and I can plot 9 plots at the same time using 3 1TB in raid 0. I put the settings to 5000mb ram and 2 threads and 128 buckets. Now this part is KEY. Each plot is going to get its own queue name. Example Plotter 1 A for first queue, Plotter 1 B for second queue. Each plot will be getting is own queue.
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Select Temp drive and final drive and than plot.
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Repeat process until you have the number of plots running concurrently. For me I do this 9 times in total to have 9 plots running at the same time. As a plot finishes the next one starts and you don’t have to worry about the plot total timing and plots piggybacking because it did not finish in the amount of time you set like will happen if you set it to plot in parallel.
I would suggest staggering the start times and NOT starting all 9 at the same time because phase 1 is the only stage that is multi-threaded and results should be better spreading out the load. Is this going to maximize you plots per day? No it is not because there is missed opportunity to utilize more threads when plots shift from phase 1 to phase 2 but it will allow for continuous plotting without having to worry about plots catching other plots or the CPU being oversubscribed with threads or the SSD being slowed down from having to many plots at once.
I know most people are not using the GUI to plot but this is the best solution I have found if you do want to use it.
