2y ago

Single Threaded Workload

Yup. always gotta be that one single threaded program. In this case, appears to be frigate.

38 comments

Multithreading is almost impossible with only a few cores. It is barely enough to run Windows 🥺
You should upgrade soon ☝🏻
- I know, it's horrible.
  Although, I really need to get this machine added into my proxmox cluster. My cluster really does need more resources....
  But, my good old unraid box just "works"... so, I don't wanna touch it lol
  
  Can it run crysis? 🤔😸
  
  I moved my unraid box into a vm on my proxmox server so that I could share the rest of the resources on the unraid server. I haven't had any issues so far and have the benefit of being able to create other vms on that server too
It’s mildly infuriating tbh but I understand it’s hard to implement threading for some functions.
What actually infuriates me more is some AAA titles that specifically utilize 4 threads of my 3950x 32 threads cpu.
- Programming with threads is much harder than using a single thread.
  First your workload has to be split up in such a way that it can be distributed. That's not always possible.
  The you gotta insert "synchronisation" to avoid a whole class of concurrency issues.
  Hence programmers always default to a single thread unless really needed.
  
  Of course - I get that. I'm a programmer myself.
  But it does have to be said that there's little excuse for not doing it anymore for heavy applications, especially games. The tools/frameworks/engines have vastly improved, and people know (at least roughly) ahead of time what work is going to slog the CPU, especially in the case of a AAA studio.
  Note: I'm only referring to relatively modern games here - anything that's older than when multithread really took off gets an automatic pass - it's not reasonable to expect someone to cater for a situation that doesn't exist yet.
  
  Programmers mostly don't know how to make multithread programs.
  
  I’m programmer myself and I understand that it’s not simple even though you can use blocking or protected collections.
  I’m referring to a situation where the programmer made a function multithreaded but hard coded creating only 4 threads “to fully utilize a 4 core cpu”
- Heh. Classic case of being able to market your product as being "multithreaded" because is uses 2 threads? :P
  
  "The garbage collector runs in a second thread! This means we're fully multithreaded now! Ship to customer and advertise multithreading!"
- I know your pain. Although, my gaming PC is only rocking a Ryzen 7 5800x. Not, nearly as many threads... but, there are a ton of games which are only using a small fraction of the available CPU.
  If I recall, Assassins' creed was pretty bad about it.... Minecraft (Especially modded) was horribly single threaded. And- more.
Unraid appreciation comment!
- It's hard not to like, it just works!
Nah, with just 8% of CPU load, you can't possibly have a CPU bottleneck...
- Oh, no bottleneck.
  But, just found it interesting out of the 64 threads on this box.... there is typically one maxed out.
  
  Oh, I was just trying to make a joke. It's not a serious commentary.
Xeon gang in the house. I picked up an HPE with an E5-2650 v4 on eBay with 64GB memory and some spinning disks for $180. Best investment I have made. It’s the z640 tower so pretty quiet and doesn’t need a rack. Core count has made my life a whole lot easier.
- My only complaint, when I doubled my ram from 128g to 256g of ddr4... it added another 100w of power usage. :-(
  
  Surely there's no way that's just the ram... did you also double your workload or something?

38 comments