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"24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse"



 
 
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  #1  
Old July 12th 17, 11:44 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Lynn McGuire[_2_]
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Posts: 65
Default "24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse"

"24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse"

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/20...move-my-mouse/

"This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my machine
was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores (48
hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM and that was
less than half used. It has a fast SSD that was mostly idle. And yet, as
I moved the mouse around it kept hitching – sometimes locking up for
seconds at a time."

Interesting. And he is a Google software developer for Chrome.

Lynn
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  #2  
Old July 13th 17, 12:33 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Lucifer Morningstar[_2_]
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Posts: 368
Default 24-core CPU and I cant move my mouse

On Wed, 12 Jul 2017 17:44:28 -0500, Lynn McGuire
wrote:

"24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse"

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/20...move-my-mouse/

"This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my machine
was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores (48
hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM and that was
less than half used. It has a fast SSD that was mostly idle. And yet, as
I moved the mouse around it kept hitching – sometimes locking up for
seconds at a time."

Interesting. And he is a Google software developer for Chrome.


Sounds made up. I can't imagine a work machine using a SSD.
Maybe the SSD is worn out.

Lynn

  #3  
Old July 13th 17, 03:06 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
B00ze
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Posts: 472
Default "24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse"

On 2017-07-12 18:44, Lynn McGuire wrote:

"24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse"

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/20...move-my-mouse/

Interesting. And he is a Google software developer for Chrome.

Lynn


Indeed. Hopefully MS fixes the problem by Fall Creator's Update...

--
! _\|/_ Sylvain /
! (o o) Memberavid-Suzuki-Fdn/EFF/Red+Cross/SPCA/Planetary-Society
oO-( )-Oo "And yesterday the planet seemed to be going so well." -Dent

  #4  
Old July 13th 17, 07:04 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Paul[_32_]
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Posts: 11,873
Default 24-core CPU and I cant move my mouse

Lucifer Morningstar wrote:
On Wed, 12 Jul 2017 17:44:28 -0500, Lynn McGuire
wrote:

"24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse"

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/20...move-my-mouse/

"This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my machine
was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores (48
hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM and that was
less than half used. It has a fast SSD that was mostly idle. And yet, as
I moved the mouse around it kept hitching – sometimes locking up for
seconds at a time."

Interesting. And he is a Google software developer for Chrome.


Sounds made up. I can't imagine a work machine using a SSD.
Maybe the SSD is worn out.


On a build machine, one with parallelization, you want
executables to launch quickly. The header files are
stored on the SSD. When multiple compile processes are
reading in header files, you want that process to be fast too.

You should try building software like this some time,
and see how it works. Try it with -j12 or whatever.

If you spent a couple grand on a 24 core processor, yes,
you're going to spend a hundred bucks on an SSD. With a
seek time of 100usec, it's worth it.

You have to get over this fixation of yours. Using the SSD
as a fast source for file reads, is a great use for it.

It would work even better, if NTFS wasn't a bottleneck.

Paul
  #5  
Old July 13th 17, 07:31 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Paul[_32_]
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Posts: 11,873
Default "24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse"

Lynn McGuire wrote:
"24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse"

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/20...move-my-mouse/


"This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my machine
was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores (48
hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM and that was
less than half used. It has a fast SSD that was mostly idle. And yet, as
I moved the mouse around it kept hitching – sometimes locking up for
seconds at a time."

Interesting. And he is a Google software developer for Chrome.

Lynn


I tested it here. I used an Insider Edition clone to test.

I used "testlimit -p" and let it run for a while,
then did a control-c and stopped it. That's a command
line program from Sysinternals (Microsoft bought them).

http://download.sysinternals.com/files/TestLimit.zip

All I can say is, "don't try this at home".

The interesting part was, my mouse remained responsive.
But I was seeing background CPU usage (as the presumed
processes were dying). I was seeing all manner of
malfunctions. Cortana disappeared at one point.
Task Manager took forever to open. Process Explorer
(procexp.exe) would not start, or rather, it just went
into a loop without its window making an appearance.
That's why I suspect Process Explorer could actually
see the forked processes.

Task Manager would not show the 30000 processes or
more that were running. I didn't get a chance to
run "tasklist" and see if I could get that to work.

The conclusion ? Win10 is not a multitasking OS :-)
Funny stuff. It's "an OS for updating your Facebook page".
In other words, "serious computing".

I don't see why I'd want to build anything on this OS.
Maybe WinXP would work ? If we could convince the Chrome
developer to switch to WinXP for builds, we might get
a WinXP version of Chrome as a side effect :-) Here's hoping.

Paul
  #6  
Old July 13th 17, 08:04 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Paul[_32_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 11,873
Default "24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse"

Lynn McGuire wrote:
"24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse"

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/20...move-my-mouse/


"This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my machine
was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores (48
hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM and that was
less than half used. It has a fast SSD that was mostly idle. And yet, as
I moved the mouse around it kept hitching – sometimes locking up for
seconds at a time."

Interesting. And he is a Google software developer for Chrome.

Lynn


I have a theory now, as to what might be going on.

The thing about semaphores and spin-locks and other
assorted gubbins, is they tend to hide the actual
behavior under the hood. There is some actual computing
going on, and this is not just some "slow code".

*******

After the reboot, I ran another test. This time,
not forking nearly as many processes with "testlimit -p".

I started Process Explorer first, and it started fine. Then,
sorted the display by PID number, with highest PID at
the top of the screen. The idea being, as soon as Testlimit
starts forking processes, the highest PID numbers float
to the top of the screen.

Then, I opened a Command Prompt (un-elevated) and

testlimit -p

When the counter got up to about 2000 processes,
I did control-C to stop it. Testlimit controlling process,
exited immediately, yielding the command prompt input.
However, the children were still there. "Tasklist"
shows them, for one thing. You can run tasklist in
Command Prompt, and see them.

And for a flash of an instant, I saw this in Process Explorer.
Before Process Explorer melted down and threw an error. Note
that the PID numbers are not contiguous and there are
missing PID numbers probably related to forked shells
(or something).

testlimit 12345 Suspended
testlimit 12354 Suspended
testlimit 12363 Suspended

In other words, the boss process I just killed, all
the children are in a suspended state, not a terminated
state and not a zombie state (zombie exists on Windows!).

Microsoft has an "optimization" for "Apps". That's a Metro
App or a UWP.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/win...suspend-resume

Say you're playing music on the Groove music player.
You click the "X" in the upper right corner (that they
thoughtfully added as an afterthought).

Well, when you do that, Groove doesn't really "die". It
enters a suspended state, and its resources are preserved.
If you start Groove again five seconds later, perhaps
your tune selection is still playing... or similar crap.
This doesn't go on forever of course, because that
would be non-scalable. At some point, those resources
need to be harvested.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/win...suspend-resume

Now, that kind of optimization is inappropriate for a
Chrome build system or for a copy of Visual Studio. As
processes which are dying there, need to die. The system
read cache is plenty good at preserving already read EXE
image info, so the next time "cc" is started, it should
start pretty fast.

*If* what I'm seeing, is the "App" treatment of Processes,
this is a mistake. However, I don't think Microsoft will fix
this. Somebody got their yearly bonus for this idea, an
idea suited to mobile, and they'll fight like the devil,
to stop anyone trying to remove the optimization.

So what's going to happen in the Feedback Hub when people
click the "me too" button on this bug ? Dunno.

Just a guess,
Paul
  #7  
Old July 13th 17, 08:37 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Paul[_32_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 11,873
Default "24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse"

Paul wrote:
Lynn McGuire wrote:
"24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse"

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/20...move-my-mouse/


"This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my
machine was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores
(48 hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM and
that was less than half used. It has a fast SSD that was mostly idle.
And yet, as I moved the mouse around it kept hitching – sometimes
locking up for seconds at a time."

Interesting. And he is a Google software developer for Chrome.

Lynn


I have a theory now, as to what might be going on.

The thing about semaphores and spin-locks and other
assorted gubbins, is they tend to hide the actual
behavior under the hood. There is some actual computing
going on, and this is not just some "slow code".

*******

After the reboot, I ran another test. This time,
not forking nearly as many processes with "testlimit -p".

I started Process Explorer first, and it started fine. Then,
sorted the display by PID number, with highest PID at
the top of the screen. The idea being, as soon as Testlimit
starts forking processes, the highest PID numbers float
to the top of the screen.

Then, I opened a Command Prompt (un-elevated) and

testlimit -p

When the counter got up to about 2000 processes,
I did control-C to stop it. Testlimit controlling process,
exited immediately, yielding the command prompt input.
However, the children were still there. "Tasklist"
shows them, for one thing. You can run tasklist in
Command Prompt, and see them.

And for a flash of an instant, I saw this in Process Explorer.
Before Process Explorer melted down and threw an error. Note
that the PID numbers are not contiguous and there are
missing PID numbers probably related to forked shells
(or something).

testlimit 12345 Suspended
testlimit 12354 Suspended
testlimit 12363 Suspended

In other words, the boss process I just killed, all
the children are in a suspended state, not a terminated
state and not a zombie state (zombie exists on Windows!).

Microsoft has an "optimization" for "Apps". That's a Metro
App or a UWP.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/win...suspend-resume


Say you're playing music on the Groove music player.
You click the "X" in the upper right corner (that they
thoughtfully added as an afterthought).

Well, when you do that, Groove doesn't really "die". It
enters a suspended state, and its resources are preserved.
If you start Groove again five seconds later, perhaps
your tune selection is still playing... or similar crap.
This doesn't go on forever of course, because that
would be non-scalable. At some point, those resources
need to be harvested.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/win...suspend-resume


Now, that kind of optimization is inappropriate for a
Chrome build system or for a copy of Visual Studio. As
processes which are dying there, need to die. The system
read cache is plenty good at preserving already read EXE
image info, so the next time "cc" is started, it should
start pretty fast.

*If* what I'm seeing, is the "App" treatment of Processes,
this is a mistake. However, I don't think Microsoft will fix
this. Somebody got their yearly bonus for this idea, an
idea suited to mobile, and they'll fight like the devil,
to stop anyone trying to remove the optimization.

So what's going to happen in the Feedback Hub when people
click the "me too" button on this bug ? Dunno.

Just a guess,
Paul


If I use

taskkill /f /im Testlimit.exe

I can get rid of all the suspended Testlimit.exe children.
And then I can open Process Explorer again and it works
properly.

And the taskkill command seems to run reasonably quickly.

Taskkill is a built-in in Command Prompt, a partial
equivalent to "kill" in Unix.

The /f means "force", the /im is the image name
I want to kill. And since that name matches thousands
of Testlimit.exe processes (about 120K each), they all
die in about three or four seconds or so.

For more info

taskkill /?

So the next task, is to stop the suspend thing (somehow).

Paul
  #8  
Old July 13th 17, 02:55 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Lucifer Morningstar[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 368
Default 24-core CPU and I cant move my mouse

On Thu, 13 Jul 2017 02:04:07 -0400, Paul
wrote:

Lucifer Morningstar wrote:
On Wed, 12 Jul 2017 17:44:28 -0500, Lynn McGuire
wrote:

"24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse"

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/20...move-my-mouse/

"This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my machine
was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores (48
hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM and that was
less than half used. It has a fast SSD that was mostly idle. And yet, as
I moved the mouse around it kept hitching – sometimes locking up for
seconds at a time."

Interesting. And he is a Google software developer for Chrome.


Sounds made up. I can't imagine a work machine using a SSD.
Maybe the SSD is worn out.


On a build machine, one with parallelization, you want
executables to launch quickly. The header files are
stored on the SSD. When multiple compile processes are
reading in header files, you want that process to be fast too.

You should try building software like this some time,
and see how it works. Try it with -j12 or whatever.

If you spent a couple grand on a 24 core processor, yes,
you're going to spend a hundred bucks on an SSD. With a
seek time of 100usec, it's worth it.

You have to get over this fixation of yours. Using the SSD
as a fast source for file reads, is a great use for it.

It would work even better, if NTFS wasn't a bottleneck.


Too risky.

Paul

  #9  
Old July 13th 17, 09:36 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Paul[_32_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 11,873
Default "24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse"

Paul wrote:
Paul wrote:
Lynn McGuire wrote:
"24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse"

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/20...move-my-mouse/


"This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my
machine was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores
(48 hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM and
that was less than half used. It has a fast SSD that was mostly idle.
And yet, as I moved the mouse around it kept hitching – sometimes
locking up for seconds at a time."

Interesting. And he is a Google software developer for Chrome.

Lynn


So the next task, is to stop the suspend thing (somehow).

Paul


It turns out, the concepts in Unix and Windows are different.
I'm quite used to parents and children in Unix, and if you
kill the parent, the children are harvested. Unix has fork
for creating a process.

Whereas Windows has CreateProcess and CreateThread, which
aren't quite the same thing. One of the articles here,
mentions that Task Manager has "End Process Tree", which
implies the same kinds of notions as Unix. Yet, tasklist
doesn't show information of that sort (if there's a parent
child relationship, only Process Explorer might be calable
of showing it, and Process Explorer hangs for any of these
experiments where large numbers of things are suspended).

If I use testlimit -p in WinXP, killing the program while
it runs in Command Prompt, harvests *most* of the children.
But after a couple runs, I had maybe 20-30 of them left over
in Task Manager. Whereas in Win10, if I test, all children enter
the Suspended state, as if they were orphans and some
dependency had been ripped out from underneath them. (In
other words, nobody sent them a "kill".) Taskkill
removes the suspended ones, and does so quickly. So it's a mystery
whether Win10 has a "process tree" and works the same way
as previous OSes. The behavior isn't re-assuring, but who
knows whether the code written, is written correctly. Maybe
what I'm seeing is "design intent".

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium...tail?id=233985

https://ninja-build.org/manual.html

"On Windows, commands are strings, so Ninja passes the
command string directly to CreateProcess. (In the common
case of simply executing a compiler this means there is
less overhead.) Consequently the quoting rules are
deterimined by the called program, which on Windows are
usually provided by the C library.

If you need shell interpretation of the command (such as
the use of && to chain multiple commands), make the
command execute the Windows shell by prefixing the
command with cmd /c.
"

If you were interested in "speed" as the ninja developers
claim, why would you launch a heavy-weight shell just to evaluate
"&&" ? Is the problem, in fact, the harvesting of "cmd",
rather than the harvesting of "cc" ? The last time I looked,
I thought there was a separate ntvdm for each Command Prompt.

"What's the correct way to cancel a ninja build in progress?"

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium...ev/Yqak1T1x2bY

With open source software development, the treatment of
Windows is always second class.

In my limited usage of Visual Studio, I don't think I've
ever seen orphan processes left around later. I don't
think I've seen that while building Firefox with their
build system (and Visual Studio to provide a callable "cc").

To get any closer to this, I'd need to set up a ninja build
environment, which means installing VS2015 (just to get "cc"),
and downloading chromium source to feed it. That seems
like a lot of work, for a little fun... To do this for
a Firefox build, takes about two days of downloading files
just to get all the components to use.

The randomascii complainant provides an executable
to test with, but on my machine it asserts a breakpoint
before doing anything. And probably expects a fully
armed Visual Studio as a runtime environment. I could
build ProcessCreateTests.cpp as he provides source,
but then, I'd need to install Visual Studio (there's a
vcproj file on the download section too).

The person best able to debug this, is another
developer who keeps these tools resident all the
time. I throw away my VS setups after I'm done
with them.

Paul
  #10  
Old July 14th 17, 02:32 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Eric Stevens
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 911
Default 24-core CPU and I cant move my mouse

On Thu, 13 Jul 2017 09:33:32 +1000, Lucifer Morningstar
wrote:

On Wed, 12 Jul 2017 17:44:28 -0500, Lynn McGuire
wrote:

"24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse"

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/20...move-my-mouse/

"This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my machine
was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores (48
hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM and that was
less than half used. It has a fast SSD that was mostly idle. And yet, as
I moved the mouse around it kept hitching – sometimes locking up for
seconds at a time."

Interesting. And he is a Google software developer for Chrome.


Sounds made up. I can't imagine a work machine using a SSD.
Maybe the SSD is worn out.


My machine has 6 cores, 32GB of RAM and 512MB of SSD. As with Lyn
McGuire all of this stuff is lightly loaded but I have the same
problems. I also have intermittent problems with intermittent lack of
response to the keyboard.

According to Driver Detective all my drivers were uptodate but
Microsoft Trouble Shooter stepped the driver for my NVIDIA GeForce GTX
1070 back to the next earlier driver. That has had a beneficial effect
on the mouse problem but the lagging of the keyboard response
continues.

I also have a 7 year old Dell Inspiron with a 4 core i7, no SSD and
16GB of RAM, which also has the same problem. It too is running
Windows 10.

I will be the first to admit that the two machines have more in common
than W10. I am still searching for the answer.
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens
  #11  
Old July 14th 17, 03:20 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
B00ze
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 472
Default 24-core CPU and I cant move my mouse

On 2017-07-13 02:04, Paul wrote:

Lucifer Morningstar wrote:
Sounds made up. I can't imagine a work machine using a SSD.
Maybe the SSD is worn out.


On a build machine, one with parallelization, you want
executables to launch quickly. The header files are
stored on the SSD. When multiple compile processes are
reading in header files, you want that process to be fast too.

You should try building software like this some time,
and see how it works. Try it with -j12 or whatever.

If you spent a couple grand on a 24 core processor, yes,
you're going to spend a hundred bucks on an SSD. With a
seek time of 100usec, it's worth it.

You have to get over this fixation of yours. Using the SSD
as a fast source for file reads, is a great use for it.


Of course! Why buy an SSD if it's to not use it? I have %temp%,
Downloads, etc, all on the SSD; you obviously want temp to be fast! What
I do not put on the SSD are programs like Games that take GB of space,
and where I can wait 20 seconds for them to load - it leaves plenty of
room on the SSD so that the wear is spread out. Of course I bought the
Samsung "pro" (2 bit cells) which lasts much longer...

It would work even better, if NTFS wasn't a bottleneck.

Paul


--
! _\|/_ Sylvain /
! (o o) Memberavid-Suzuki-Fdn/EFF/Red+Cross/SPCA/Planetary-Society
oO-( )-Oo Scotty's smoking the dilithium crystals again, Jim.

 




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