[Tech Help] Weird CPU issue

[Nenime]

EnigmaMaitreya's thread "SA Client had been Rock Solid but Luna Invasion" is about performance, if I understand aright. With regard to that, I encounterd something peculiar. I would be most grateful if a techies could explain this:





I was monitoring the impact of SA on my elder computer system (Athlon 64 3200+; 2GB RAM; Geforce 7600 GS) compared to KR. I checked two similar locations with both clients (no actions, about the same number of animals/NPCs in range, same resolution [1280x1024] etc) Look at this:

Location 1 (upper picture):

• KR: CPU 30%; RAM 35%
• SA: CPU 100% (!); RAM 34%

Location 2 (lower picture):

• KR: CPU 40%; RAM 39%
• SA: CPU 0% (!); RAM 33%

I tried this several times always with the same results.

 

[EnigmaMaitreya]

The amount of ram seems to be more or less consistent within the two scenario's.

The Red Flag is the 100% CPU and the 0% CPU of the SA Client.

I am going to assume your getting the readings from oh lets say the Task Manager Performance Tab.

I normaly would be more inclined to dismiss these values as a generalization many things can be contributing. BUT you said you tried several times with consistent results.

I would ask a question, of the two locations, have you or do you visit one more often than the other? If so is it by chance the one with the 0% utilization?

The jest of this is that 100% utilization is not of its own accord a bad thing.

Let us assume the SA Client is written in such a way as to take advantage of multiple threading.

One might see a scenario were the SA Client has decided that it needs to do some low priority/background work. It may start this task on a different thread and give it a lower priority. This means that when there is time left over on the CPU and the task is ready to run, it will be given the opportunity to run. In this context this background task may drive the CPU utilization to 100%. This of course gives the illusion that the SA Client as the Player see4s it is consuming 100% of the CPU time. *Shrug* It is and it isn't ....

I have simplified the above in the hopes that I did not get overly convoluted.

 

[Nenime]

The jest of this is that 100% utilization is not of its own accord a bad thing.

Let us assume the SA Client is written in such a way as to take advantage of multiple threading.

One might see a scenario were the SA Client has decided that it needs to do some low priority/background work. It may start this task on a different thread and give it a lower priority. This means that when there is time left over on the CPU and the task is ready to run, it will be given the opportunity to run. In this context this background task may drive the CPU utilization to 100%. This of course gives the illusion that the SA Client as the Player see4s it is consuming 100% of the CPU time.

Yes, this is the answer! Thank you for your quick reply.
Actually, I got the results from a little programm embedded into the keyboard driver and shown on a keyboard build-in monitor. After reading your post, I repeated the test but switched over to another tool to watch the CPU and RAM values. As soon as I switch, CPU load goes down to zero. So that's it, idle background activity, just like you said. Albeit obsure what kind of and why only in the upper case. (FYI, location is south (1) and east (2) of Moonglow Zoo. I visit the cotton field every now and then but not often enough to get it into the cache.)

It seems that SA should be running smoothly on this machine. I'm curious of what will happen in Luna tomorrow, hopefully not a slideshow.

 

[Heartseeker]

The jest of this is that 100% utilization is not of its own accord a bad thing.

Let us assume the SA Client is written in such a way as to take advantage of multiple threading.

One might see a scenario were the SA Client has decided that it needs to do some low priority/background work. It may start this task on a different thread and give it a lower priority. This means that when there is time left over on the CPU and the task is ready to run, it will be given the opportunity to run. In this context this background task may drive the CPU utilization to 100%. This of course gives the illusion that the SA Client as the Player see4s it is consuming 100% of the CPU time.

Yes, this is the answer! Thank you for your quick reply.
Actually, I got the results from a little programm embedded into the keyboard driver and shown on a keyboard build-in monitor. After reading your post, I repeated the test but switched over to another tool to watch the CPU and RAM values. As soon as I switch, CPU load goes down to zero. So that's it, idle background activity, just like you said. Albeit obsure what kind of and why only in the upper case. (FYI, location is south (1) and east (2) of Moonglow Zoo. I visit the cotton field every now and then but not often enough to get it into the cache.)

It seems that SA should be running smoothly on this machine. I'm curious of what will happen in Luna tomorrow, hopefully not a slideshow.

I was having a bit of a slide show in Luna.

Made an adjustment or two and it's better.

One thing that worked well in my case was turning off idle animation.

While, it can look cool, in Luna there is to much happening.