Need Help - Windows

[Pantho]

http://www.sevenforums.com/general-disc ... post440922

So that is the forum link, I really feel like flipping and just calling them complete fucking retards who should have there forum titles removed...

"Seven Guru" my ass...

Ok, so Task Manager has a Resource monitor in windows 7. This Resource Monitor is handy, it can record CPU Average over a 60 second period, in case files are jumping to high cpu for only fractions of a second. Basically my problem was a game kept jumping to "apparently" 3000+ % CPU usage for a fraction of a second, now forgive me if I end up being wrong, but how the hell does my CPU output 3000+% CPU capacity.


One guy: logicearth who has a custom title "Seven Guru" says

Maybe it is not screwing up the "CPU Average" and maybe over 200 is the correct average...unless you know something we don't? Just saying... Nothing is free on a computer, every flick of the mouse incurs CPU time, just watching Resource Monitor itself requires CPU time.

then replies with C/P to my argument with this:

Well maybe you should look at what "Average CPU" means.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749226%28WS.10%29.aspx

The average CPU load over the last 60 seconds resulting from the application instance, expressed as a percentage of the CPU's total capacity.

60 seconds btw, is a long time to a computer that works in microseconds.

Completely fucking retard, maybe 205 isn't the correct value, then printing something saying CPU Average means average CPU usage over 60 seconds contradicting himself and making me sound wrong still.

Anyway, end result meant my CPU Average said 205%, which I'm 99% is impossible to obtain. It would be like trying to fill a 100ml cup with 205ml of water, it's just not going to happen.

Anyway, someone tell me I'm not crazy and the guys at severnforums are just complete fucking retards considering this is the number 1 Windows 7 technical help forum...

PS I am Sam86.

[satransisuu]

i have seen this before, i remember being thrown for a loop when i saw CPU usage around 399% on a quad core making a rainbow table. I believe it is due to having multiple cores and the math being off. If you have 4 quad cores then you get 400% with some system monitors. There is not much to worry about as far as that, try using the sysinternals suite to see if it gives you something different. I trust that better than the stock options, though im not sure if they work properly for win7.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... 42062.aspx

Now having said that, are you having problems with dragon age?

[Lachlan]

i have seen this before, i remember being thrown for a loop when i saw CPU usage around 399% on a quad core making a rainbow table. I believe it is due to having multiple cores and the math being off. If you have 4 quad cores then you get 400% with some system monitors. There is not much to worry about as far as that, try using the sysinternals suite to see if it gives you something different. I trust that better than the stock options, though im not sure if they work properly for win7.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... 42062.aspx

I doubt in a brand new operating system like Windows 7 you'd see the math being off as you describe. Most systems I've come across see cores as just another CPU and every modern OS recognizes multiple CPUs in their performance monitoring tools and adjusts the math appropriately (typically % utilization represents capacity of all CPUs and across all process threads). I would even expect them to be able to handle hyperthreading (2 execution threads per core) properly. So, a quad-core hyperthreaded CPU would show up as 8 CPUs in the monitor.

I noticed in one post in that thread someone said, "You should also note your CPU is throttling itself up and down depending on load. So it can in fact "magically" increase capacity. The blue line represents this throttling."

In my Googling, I came across "Core Parking" in a thread where people who'd upgraded to Win7 and had quad-core CPUs were seeing FPS degrade because Win7 was being too aggressive in shutting down cores. It'd be worth investigating to see if this is causing your DA performance problems and possibly the weirdness in the monitor due to it throttling capacity up and down. I can think of a situation, where, if there's a race condition between when it samples CPU usage when throttled up and then samples/calculates total CPU capacity after it's been throttled down, it would show that process as using more than 100%.

Core Parking - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/threa ... 1277&sid=1 and http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?m=1861804

[Pantho]

i have seen this before, i remember being thrown for a loop when i saw CPU usage around 399% on a quad core making a rainbow table. I believe it is due to having multiple cores and the math being off. If you have 4 quad cores then you get 400% with some system monitors. There is not much to worry about as far as that, try using the sysinternals suite to see if it gives you something different. I trust that better than the stock options, though im not sure if they work properly for win7.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... 42062.aspx

I doubt in a brand new operating system like Windows 7 you'd see the math being off as you describe. Most systems I've come across see cores as just another CPU and every modern OS recognizes multiple CPUs in their performance monitoring tools and adjusts the math appropriately (typically % utilization represents capacity of all CPUs and across all process threads). I would even expect them to be able to handle hyperthreading (2 execution threads per core) properly. So, a quad-core hyperthreaded CPU would show up as 8 CPUs in the monitor.

I noticed in one post in that thread someone said, "You should also note your CPU is throttling itself up and down depending on load. So it can in fact "magically" increase capacity. The blue line represents this throttling."

In my Googling, I came across "Core Parking" in a thread where people who'd upgraded to Win7 and had quad-core CPUs were seeing FPS degrade because Win7 was being too aggressive in shutting down cores. It'd be worth investigating to see if this is causing your DA performance problems and possibly the weirdness in the monitor due to it throttling capacity up and down. I can think of a situation, where, if there's a race condition between when it samples CPU usage when throttled up and then samples/calculates total CPU capacity after it's been throttled down, it would show that process as using more than 100%.

Core Parking - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/threa ... 1277&sid=1 and http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?m=1861804

You are write with the math not being wrong.

But even with the throttling it would be impossible to take enough high samples to get 205 average when many of the samples must have been taken at 80. Consider it is nearly always around 80 and only jumps high for 1 or 2 samples. If it was only 105% then I might have started to believe the throttling idea. I also doubt that the CPU could even run at 3,5xx% even for a microsecond, it just sounds impossible to me.


Anyway I pretty much sorted the thread out, the so called forum whores where being moronic idiots...
Probably just obsessed with windows 7 so much that they failed to see a possible bug.

-edit

I noticed performance drops in HL2 games with going to windows 7. But I'm only using Core2Duo.

[Lachlan]

But even with the throttling it would be impossible to take enough high samples to get 205 average when many of the samples must have been taken at 80. Consider it is nearly always around 80 and only jumps high for 1 or 2 samples. If it was only 105% then I might have started to believe the throttling idea. I also doubt that the CPU could even run at 3,5xx% even for a microsecond, it just sounds impossible to me.

That would depend whether it's using microstate accounting or not. I know Solaris, OS X, and Linux have it, but I couldn't find any information on what Windows uses. I've done a lot of server performance monitoring, but never done much with Windows.

There's two basic types of accounting that I'm aware of:

Clock-based accounting - Virtually every operating system in existence has a clock function - a periodic interrupt used to perform regular system activity.The clock function does a number of simple tasks, mostly having to do with process and CPU accounting. Clock based accounting examines each CPU, and increments per-process statistics depending on whether the current thread is in user mode, system mode, or idle. This uses statistical sampling (taking a snapshot every 15 milliseconds) to come up with a picture of system resource usage.

Microstate accounting - With microstate accouning, the counters are updated with each state transition as they occur in real time. This results in much more accurate, if more expensive, accounting information.

I agree with you that it's a bug, as you would think whether it was statistical sampling or microstate, then the sampling of current resource usage and total capacity would be synchronous so that such a race condition couldn't occur. However, the bug would have to be in the kernel where the accounting is done and not the performance monitor itself which just reads the counters. Simply put, I don't think the kernel properly handles the fact that the hardware is dynamically throttling up and down as needed.

[satransisuu]

have you tried sysinternals suite to check the process load? Procmon.exe will do that for you. As for the math being wrong, some systems see each core as a seperate CPU and thus count it as its own %. So if you have two cores one working at 60% and the other at 60% you are using 120%. I have seen this in both ubuntu and fedora. I dont see why windows cant follow suit with their new OS, it is a legit possibility.

[Lachlan]

As for the math being wrong, some systems see each core as a seperate CPU and thus count it as its own %. So if you have two cores one working at 60% and the other at 60% you are using 120%. I have seen this in both ubuntu and fedora. I dont see why windows cant follow suit with their new OS, it is a legit possibility.

That's because you have top configured for single CPU mode and you have multiple CPUs. Press the 1 key to toggle into SMP mode.

[Pantho]

It's all fixed -

Well not fixed, but confirmed as a very rare Resource Monitor bug in windows 7.

2x100% = 205% ( )

Plus with average being actually around 85% that wouldn't make much sense, but no. The issue with Resource Monitor measuring 3k cpu usage for a split second is a bug.

[satransisuu]

ohh so it is a bug with the software calculating the percents wrong?

[Pantho]

ohh so it is a bug with the software calculating the percents wrong?

Well not exactly.

It's a bug with Windows 7 Task manager/Resource Monitor bug recording the actual CPU value wrong.

One sample out of x thousand was 3k heh.

Only found one other person ever notice this, so I guess its rare.

[Krypto]

i have seen this before, i remember being thrown for a loop when i saw CPU usage around 399% on a quad core making a rainbow table. I believe it is due to having multiple cores and the math being off. If you have 4 quad cores then you get 400% with some system monitors. There is not much to worry about as far as that, try using the sysinternals suite to see if it gives you something different. I trust that better than the stock options, though im not sure if they work properly for win7.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... 42062.aspx

I doubt in a brand new operating system like Windows 7 you'd see the math being off as you describe.

Someone apparently doesn't know microsoft. lol

[satransisuu]

zing!