Einstein@Home causing system chunkiness

Richard Haselgrove
Richard Haselgrove
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RE: Could that be the

Quote:

Could that be the "driver downclock" problem mentioned at the SETI boards with the newest nVidia drivers?

Gruß,
Gundolf


The downclock bug has also been referenced here.

However, every confirmed report I've seen so far has been in relation to Windows, not Linux.

Dagorath
Dagorath
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Indeed this might be the

Indeed this might be the downclock problem. It's easy to check. Areeda maybe you could run the following command in a terminal while you are experiencing slow frame rates while decoding.

[pre]nvidia-settings -t -q all | grep ClockFreqsString[/pre]

Then post the output of that command here.

joe areeda
joe areeda
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I will as soon as I notice it

I will as soon as I notice it happening again. I'll experiment with a script to monitor it.

My laptop does get rebooted regularly so I'm not sure how frequently it occurs.

Joe

joe areeda
joe areeda
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I wrote a little bash script

I wrote a little bash script to monitor the clock frequencies.

Well, I didn't expect this behavior but it makes sense.

There are 3 speeds this thing seems to run at. After booting it runs at minimum speed:

Sun Jun 12 20:47:04 PDT 2011 to nvclock=135, memclock=135, processorclock=270

When I run the Ubuntu movie player or Boinc it goes up to:

Sun Jun 12 20:48:45 PDT 2011 to nvclock=606, memclock=790, processorclock=1468

And it throttles down to a mid value when the job using it stops:

Sun Jun 12 20:49:11 PDT 2011 to nvclock=405, memclock=405, processorclock=810

So I guess the question will be does it fail to speed up when required more than what speed it's running at.

Joe

The script I'm using:

#!/bin/bash
while [ 1 ]; do
        dat=`date`
        cur=`nvidia-settings -t -q GPUCurrentClockFreqsString`
        old="ain't gonna match nothing"
        if [ -e ~/gpuClock.txt ]; then old=`cat ~/gpuClock.txt`; fi
        if [ "$cur" != "$old" ]; 
        then
                log=`echo "frequency changed at" $dat " to " $cur`
                echo $log
                echo $log >> ~/gpuClock.log
                echo $cur > ~/gpuClock.txt
        fi
        sleep 5
done
Gundolf Jahn
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RE: So I guess the question

Quote:
So I guess the question will be does it fail to speed up when required more than what speed it's running at.


Maybe you can trigger that behaviour by suspending an Einstein CUDA (BRP) task midrun.

Gruß,
Gundolf

Computer sind nicht alles im Leben. (Kleiner Scherz)

Dirk
Dirk
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Hmm are you by any chance

Hmm are you by any chance running 2 monitors on the GPU? I've noticed some chunkiness lately as well, not often though and it usually doesn't last long. Thing is I recently added a 2nd monitor and I think I first saw the chunkiness appear after I did that. Of course I can be utterly wrong, the pc had been running for quite a while without a reboot after all so maybe it just needed a reboot (which I just did). During the chunkiness GPU usage drops quite a bit and gets very irregular (normally it's stable between 78-80% while crunching 4 WUs at a time).

joe areeda
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RE: Maybe you can trigger

Quote:

Maybe you can trigger that behaviour by suspending an Einstein CUDA (BRP) task midrun.

Gruß,
Gundolf


I'll try various stressors but having it set to not use GPU when computer is in use seems to suspend the BRP task a lot. The GPU clock seems to change about every minute when I'm at the keyboard. Here's what it looks like for about 19hrs

I did figure out why the average credit of this machine has gone down so much recently. When I changed it to use the GPU only when the computer is not in use, I forgot about blank screen savers. I do like the automatic locking of the screen after being idle.

Joe

Dirk
Dirk
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Wow, I'm glad I've always let

Wow, I'm glad I've always let it use the GPU while in use.

Anyways, haven't had any chunkiness since my reboot so I guess a 2nd monitor isn't the cause of the problem.

Dagorath
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Your clock is up and down


Your clock is up and down like a yoyo. Mine never change. They're at max as soon as the machine boots and they stay up no matter what. I allow BOINC to use the GPU when I'm using the computer and I never see any chunkiness.

When I do "nvidia-settings -q GPUCurrentPerfMode && nvidia-settings -q GPUCurrentPerfLevel" it tells me the perfmode is 0 and the perflevel is 2. I assume perf refers to performance. Maybe setting those the same as mine will keep your clocks at max and eliminate chunkiness.

Hold it...

When I do "nvidia-settings -q all | grep Perf" it says perfmode is 1, not zero as with the above command. I don't know which one is right.

joe areeda
joe areeda
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RE: Your clock is up and

Quote:

Your clock is up and down like a yoyo. Mine never change. They're at max as soon as the machine boots and they stay up no matter what. I allow BOINC to use the GPU when I'm using the computer and I never see any chunkiness.


Dagroth,
I changed the settings in BOINC to use the GPU while computer is in use and use GPU always and the clock does stabilize at the max rate. So I believe this is how it's supposed to work.

The way I interpret the yoyo effect is that the clock rate is reduced when the the GPU idle conserving power and reducing heat. So without a background GPU hog running the upclocks represent significant screen updates.

The problem with letting BOINC use the GPU is that display and especially video operations are impacted and frankly the user experience is more important than donating cycles to E@H (not much).

Joe

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