Today I re-learned, that running a speedtest while mining on CPU... is disappointing.

[VirtualLarry]

I did my Windows 10 Cumulative Update (again), and swapped my LAN over to my Gigabit FIOS connection.

Just on a whim, I decided to do a speedtest, using speedtest.net .

My results, were under 300Mbit/sec down. WTF?

Switch server, still same deal.

Then I remembered, A-HA, I'm mining on CPU.

Stopped mining, perfect speedtest, 940Mbit/sec down and up.

Let this be a lesson, heavy CPU load will cripple networking. At least, with my mobo and RealTek gigabit NIC.

Or maybe, it's Windows Defender, scanning every bit of data coming over the interface, and there's a way to turn that off.

I find it hard to believe that an application can hog that much CPU time, that the driver and interrupts can't get enough CPU time to push gigabit. Especially on a Ryzen 5 1600 CPU.

 

[sdifox]

Don't have any intel nic lying around?

 

[TheELF]

Them's the breaks when you are a sys admin on a multitasking OS.
It doesn't matter how many cores you have a DC type app will use them all so you might as well be talking about a single thread core CPU,anybody old enough to remember will know that you have to work the task manager's (or cmd) task priority to give your low demand tasks enough CPU cycles.

 

[mxnerd]

OP only realized that network activity takes processing power until now?

 

[sdifox]

OP only realized that network activity takes processing power until now?

Magic packet :awe:

 

[VirtualLarry]

OP only realized that network activity takes processing power until now?

But there's processing power available. Four of my CPU time graphs are only half-full when mining. It's some other bottleneck, probably cache bandwidth.

 

[mxnerd]

Like sdifox has suggested, if you use an INTEL NIC, the situation probably will be much better.

You can offload network computing processing onto INTEL's network chip, which is much larger in size than Realtek's and cost a lot more.

CPU is for generic purpose, not particularly designed for networking, it's interrupted thousands of time per second. Every time a network packet send/receive a packet (well, actually all I/O activities in a computer), it will interrupt the CPU and ask CPU to process it if it's not offload to the network chip.

 

[mxnerd]

Different I/Os have different IRQ levels for CPU Interrupt.

https://helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/manage-irq-settings-windows/

The above example show that Realtek network got IRQ priority level at 18.

I just checked mine and found that mine is at about the lowest level 4294967293, only above SATA IO, WTH?

 

[FaaR]

The above example show that Realtek network got IRQ priority level at 18.

I just checked mine and found that mine is at about the lowest level 4294967293, only above SATA IO, WTH?

Pretty sure that's not actually priorities as such; legacy PCs had only a fixed set of IRQs (Interrupt ReQuests); on old ISA bus you manually set which IRQ an add-in board should use using jumper blocks, which could be fiddly and annoying as not all hardware allowed the use of every (of the few) IRQs available, and you couldn't share them - IRQ collisions (or I/O address selection or DMA channel, some or all of which had to be selected manually by users) were a frequent source of PC malfunctions back in the day.

Windows then added PnP (plug and play - a term you never really hear these days as it's not really something to brag about anymore ) support and first kludged that onto ISA bus (which never worked reliably honestly), and then later PCI, which was built with PnP in mind from the ground up. Part of PnP includes some sort of IRQ extension protocol/software re-use of the limited physical IRQs - hence IRQ 39 million listed in device manager or wherever you found that info.

After all, many modern PCs contain way more hardware devices than PCs of old, if you were locked to the old system of unique IRQs with no re-use, you'd be SOL. Which physical IRQ your network card is mapped to I've no idea, or if it's even possible to find out. Probably is, if you're a windows wizard (from the moon)...

 

[mxnerd]

if you were locked to the old system of unique IRQs with no re-use, you'd be SOL

I'm old. learned that computer science class 30 years ago.

 

[VirtualLarry]

This is weird. I did some more speedtests, while mining. The difference, different server (OK), as well as, I upgraded my RAM in this Ryzen 5 1600 rig, to 32GB (4x8GB DDR4-2400). Before, it was running 16GB (2x8GB DDR4-2400, that would only run stable at 2133).

Now, I'm getting 575Mbit/sec down and 920Mbit/sec up.

Strange, but interesting.

Could raising the bottleneck of the IF, by changing the RAM speed from 2133 to 2400, change things that much? I'm also overclocked, from 3.40Ghz all-core, to 3.80Ghz all-core, manual OC. I don't remember if I was OCed before when I ran those speedtests.

Edit: Stopped mining, same server (it's like 3 or 4 AM right now, Eastern time zone), and I got 943Mbit/sec down, and 941Mbit/sec up.

Edit: Started mining on the CPU again, 583Mbit/sec down, 940Mbit/sec up.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Anyways, my friend with the Athlon II X4 called me last night, and wanted some help. He was VERY concerned, that his cable internet speedtests (that he does every 5-10 minutes, he's fixated on this thing), were only reading 170Mbit/sec down, rather than 200Mbit/sec down, and they had been as high as 260-280Mbit/sec down a month ago, after his connection got fixed.

He also mentioned that only 16 downstream channels were "locked", out of the 24 that his modem will do. I told him I had read online that his ISP was doing some maintenance around the country, and was decreasing the downstream channel counts available on various nodes.

We'll see if the channels come back, eventually, soon.

One weird thing is, though, his PS4 gives him 220Mbit/sec down speedtests, around the same time.

So it seems his speedtest.net speedtests are slower than his PS4, which, it used to be the other way around, I though.

He updated his Flash Player, and I think that he's still using the Flash-based Speedtest.net site, which IMHO seems "laggy", and less accurate. So there's that.

I was wondering, maybe he picked up some malware on some sites, or something? I had him update Malwarebytes, and run it, and it found Conduit, but nothing else. (Apparently installed, as part of DivX Player?)

So I was sort of wondering, in the back of my head, given my experiences with mining affecting my speedtests, maybe he has a mining trojan / rootkit? He's running Windows 7 64-bit.