mprime brings my system to a crawl
 

I'm running mprime on a laptop and mprime brings my linux distro to a crawl. Interestingly enough, when I boot into Windows 10 and run mprime in in the Linux Sub layer there, everything seems fine.

I have priority set to 1, and the number of workers set to the number of cpus in my machine.

Any ideas how I might troubleshoot this?

[c]man nice[/c]

A value of 19 might help.

:mike:

[QUOTE=benjamin;476917]I'm running mprime on a laptop and mprime brings my linux distro to a crawl. Interestingly enough, when I boot into Windows 10 and run mprime in in the Linux Sub layer there, everything seems fine.

I have priority set to 1, and the number of workers set to the number of cpus in my machine.

Any ideas how I might troubleshoot this?[/QUOTE]

Normal priority is 0. Nicest is 19. The default for prime is 10, which I find works well.

Whatever you do, never set mprime's priority to a negative value, as your system may basically become completely unresponsive. I actually think it's a bug that mprime allows settings lower than 0.

Having 4 workers on 4 cores made my system lagging and stuttering even at niceness 19.
1 worker for 4 cores runs without any issue and has almost the same throughput in my case.

[QUOTE=heliosh;476993]1 worker for 4 cores runs without any issue and has almost the same throughput in my case.[/QUOTE]

That makes sense. It's known as "memory bandwidth saturation".

Thanks so much for the help. And thanks too for teaching me about nice and renice.

Well, I've set nice values to 19, have one worker on all 4 cores. The system is still very slow. For example: there exists key input lag from letters to brightness value, scrolling is slow in chrome with graphics tearing, and applications take forever to launch.

I have Solus installed alongside Windows 10 on a new Surface Book 2. I know this system is far from being cleared for Linux, but it's been very stable so far. Coupled with the nice screen a good keyboard, it seems like a little text editor monster.

I thought I'd throw the rest of my machine's computational power to helping out.

Incidentally, running top on ubuntu in WSL on the Windows side shows an NI value of 42+ for mprime.

Thanks very much for the help. Thanks especially for information on nice and renice. I'm new to Linux, and so these types of things are really interesting to learn about.

Unfortunately, after setting NI to 19 with 1 working on 4 cores, my system still lags: keyboard inputs are behind, scrolling in chrome is slow, applications take long to load, etc.

I'm on a Surface Book 2. I know it's far from checked out for Linux, but it has some recent tech. Surely, I should be able to get it up and running.

Incidentely, on the Windows side (I dual book Solus with W10), when running mprime under WSL, the NI value reads 42+ and the system runs well.

Could be a thermal issue, have you checked the CPU temperature?

[QUOTE=heliosh;477137]Could be a thermal issue, have you checked the CPU temperature?[/QUOTE]

psensor shows that temps hover around 70 degrees but go up into the 90s on occasion. The machine feels very warm to the touch. This is around 74

On the Windows side, Task Manager show mprime to take up 40-70% of the cpu and temps are much cooler.

It's not surprising that Windows runs cooler and perhaps more efficiently, of course.

mprime is the only cpu intensive program I've tested on my Linux boot (Solus).

Try running it with 1 worker 3 cores; sounds like the thermal design isn't happy with the CPU running full steam continuously. It's possible that you'll get very similar times with 3 threads as four.

Surely lagginess could also be a sign of memory bandwidth thrashing? Or maybe even just paging-to-disk thrashing if memory is full (unlikely, but mentioned for completeness).

Edit: I keep forgetting that this is a Linux-only problem. It *is* a surprise that the symptoms are different on the different OSs.