iMac 21.5 i7 or i5 for Encryption

[SOT DOC]

I currently have a late 2009 21.5 base iMac and am thinking of upgrading to a new 2011. I run a program called MacPractice which is for the medical field. It has just been updated recently to meet the upcoming requirements for electronic health records, which part of is keeping everything encrypted at all times. Since upgrading the program I have noticed more beachballs and slowness. I think this is from the constant encryption of the files. I also use parallels. Would the extra threads with the i7 help out?

Thanks

 

[Waragainstsleep]

That will depend entirely on how the application is coded and how parallelised the encryption is.
That said the new CPUs will faster than the old ones and encrypting and decrypting files.
Are these files large? Do you know how strong the encryption is?

An SSD might make a difference too. Fire up Activity monitor while opening and saving files with your medical app. You should be able to ascertain exactly where the bottleneck is by monitoring the CPU and disk usage for spikes during this activity.