Strange occurrences with VLAR wu's and Xeon 700

[OhioDude]

Please take a look at this pic of Win2K task manager on the quad Xeon 700.



The AR's of the wu's being done by each CPU are as follows:

CPU 0 - 0.033
CPU 1 - 0.032
CPU 2 - 0.044
CPU 3 - 4.023

It would appear that these Xeon's are having problems with VLAR's. The first nine wu's done by this system had AR's of .408 and higher and averaged about 5:57 per wu with the slowest being 6:03 for a .408 AR wu.

CPU 0 has been working on it's wu for 7:03 and it's only 76.1% completed.
CPU 1 has been working on it's wu for 6:27 and it's only 72.5% completed.
CPU 2 has been working on it's wu for 6:30 and it's only 73.7% completed.
CPU 3 has been working on it's wu for 1:11 and it's already 26% completed.

We're talking about a three hour hit for VLAR's on this thing! :Q

Anybody have any idea as to why the VLAR's are causing the spikes in idle time for CPU's 0, 1 and 2? These Xeons have 1MB cache. Could it have anything to do with possibly not being able to load everything into cache for the VLAR's and having to consistently wait as new data is loaded into cache?

I'm curious...

 

[JWMiddleton]

George,

With Win9x you would expect a 50% hit on the VLAR WUs, but you are running Win2k on that multi-processor box! So, what's up? :Q Where is Poof when you need her?

 

[BadThad]

Strange? Did you try rebooting that box? Only 1 CPU is consistantly running at 100% utilization. There's no other processes running on this system? Have you disabled unnecessary services? Overall only 76% cpu utilization?

How about showing us the processes tab?

 

[Baldy18]

How about showing us the inside of the case?

 

[OhioDude]

BT --

I'm currently hot-staging software on the system so it has been rebooted many, many times in the last 24 hours. Here's a pic of the processes tab (sh.exe is the Seti@Home client.)



Baldy18 --

She's gorgeous with her clothes off.

 

[Poof]

:Q



I'm here! Yeah, those VLARs are a PITA. I just looked at my queue and one of the CPUs on my dual Xeon 500 finished a 0.000. In 11:55hrs. :Q The dually is running 2K Advanced Server. Avg. WU times are ~9 -10hrs/WU.

Meanwhile, my dual XP running Red Hat 7.3 is chewing through VLARs like there's no tomorrow. Running them ~15 minutes faster than mid ARs.

That dasm CLI has a bug and they don't care. I have SP2 on the 2K and it seems worse than when I didn't have the SP on it.

I hate windoze.

 

[Hellburner]

Something suspicious, check the priority on that System Idle Process.

Does your flavor of Win2K support four way?

 

[Assimilator1]

On my Ath XP with Win2k VLAR WU's only take about 15-20 mins longer than an av AR WU,normal time is about 3hrs 25mins/WU

 

[OhioDude]

Does your flavor of Win2K support four way?

Yes. Windows 2000 Advanced Server.

It's only VLAR's that cause this. It's now munching on these AR's:

CPU 0 - 7.378
CPU 1 - 7.22
CPU 2 - 7.22
CPU 3 - 0.432

CPU utilization shows 100%. The 7.378 AR just finished in 4:41. The 7.22 AR wu's should finish in about 10 minutes, making them approx 4:45 each. The .432 AR wu is 52% done after 3:44.

Just wondering why only VLAR's cause the spike in idle time...

 

[Baldy18]

Originally posted by: OhioDude
Baldy18 --

She's gorgeous with her clothes off.

must....stop......drooling....need....to....see.....pics......

 

[Poof]

OhioDude - there's something going on with VLARs related to how it does pulse searches and system calls. I first saw it when running the CLI in WINE using WINE's "nt40" parameter. About 1/3rd of the way into processing a WU, the CPU would only use ~75% - 80-% on SETI for the rest of the WU and the other 2x% would be the wineserver, which supposedly equated to windoze doing some sort of system calls. This phenonmena seemed to happen to some people and not others. I have a feeling that there is a distinct .dll file difference between those who experience it to such a degree and those who don't (perhaps related to SPs and/or hotfixes). Normally 9x/ME suffers the worst, again assuming that certain windoze SPs/hot fixes (or combos of fixes) are either there or not.

I hate windoze.

 

[SoulAssassin]

After seeing this thread the other day, I just remembered to check the quad Xeon 700 (specifically a Compaq DL580 running 2KAS w SP2 & 4GB) that I have running SETI and realized that I'm seeing the same problem. Not sure how to check for a VLAR since I don't have any SETI utils here. I think what I'm seeing here is a little different from what Poof what describing and more of what we see in OhioDude's first screen shot. It's not that SETI is taking up X% of CPU and the OS or anything else is taking Y% but that it's sporadically using less that 100% of the cpu for anything. The system idle process is actually running. I've tried experimenting w various levels of priority with the same results. I can understand what Poof said if it was using the remaining cpu for system calls/overhead/etc but it's actually showing idle time. Weird.

 

[SoulAssassin]

^....with all the welcome threads this was on page 3 in about 9 seconds.