Unimpressive CPU Usage, max 10%-12%

[commandercody38]

One of the annoying issues that causes toolpath and stock model generation to take a rather long time is I noticed CPU usage hits maybe 12%. My watercooler should sound like it's about to take flight like it does when verifying G-code in Vericut. Is there something I'm missing to enable full usage of my CPU?

System specs:

11th Gen Intel Core i9-11900K @ 3.50GHz 8 cores

32 gigs of RAM

NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 8 giga VRAM

 

Thanks everyone,

[crazy^millman]

Nope nothing can be done and this topic has been covered extensively over the years.

[rgrin]

Only real thing you can try is to overclock if you're willing to push past the basic boost clock.  But even that probably won't show perceptible gains.

[commandercody38]

Thank you everyone. Ya, that's what I feared. We'll be making the switch to Siemens NX in the near future and I'm hopeful it can utilize computer resources more effectively. Mastercam will be kept around with one license for fixing older programs after the switch.

[crazy^millman]

3 minutes ago, commandercody38 said:

Thank you everyone. Ya, that's what I feared. We'll be making the switch to Siemens NX in the near future and I'm hopeful it can utilize computer resources more effectively. Mastercam will be kept around with one license for fixing older programs after the switch.

That is sounding like a familiar tune as a of late.

[Greg Williams]

The grass is not much greaner over there, there are a few spikes but not too many

[#Rekd™]

4 hours ago, Greg Williams said:

The grass is not much greaner over there,

How does the file size compare?

[Colin Gilchrist]

5 hours ago, commandercody38 said:

Thank you everyone. Ya, that's what I feared. We'll be making the switch to Siemens NX in the near future and I'm hopeful it can utilize computer resources more effectively. Mastercam will be kept around with one license for fixing older programs after the switch.

If you're concerned about resources and processing time, go to the cloud. Get the cloud version of NX, and don't look back.

Virtualization is the future. Spinning up Azure Virtual Machines with Hyper-V, each running a Windows 10 virtualized desktop, with 14, 28, 56, or 112 Gb of RAM, "on demand", all running on top of a giant GPU cluster. Use the latest tools with zero install, through a web browser, at 1080p (for the 14 Gb, lowest tier), or 4K for the higher three tiers.

[Kyle F]

8 hours ago, Colin Gilchrist said:

Virtualization is the future. Spinning up Azure Virtual Machines with Hyper-V, each running a Windows 10 virtualized desktop, with 14, 28, 56, or 112 Gb of RAM, "on demand", all running on top of a giant GPU cluster. Use the latest tools with zero install, through a web browser, at 1080p (for the 14 Gb, lowest tier), or 4K for the higher three tiers.

I'll take two!!!

haha that sounds really nice though for real 

[Aaron Eberhard]

13 hours ago, Greg Williams said:

The grass is not much greaner over there, there are a few spikes but not too many

 

At the end of the day, even as nice as cloud based on demand # of CPUs are, toolpath processing is, on the whole, a mostly sequential operation..  

 

I know we've talked about it a lot here, but if you think about how a toolpath works, it almost always requires knowing what already happened to make an efficient one (what area the tool has already been through, where stock was already removed, etc).   There's only so much optimization you can do with multi-threading in this arena and everyone is doing the same sort of "slice it and isolate individual pockets for multi-threading" thing that Mastercam is doing.    

I won't say that Mastercam is the best in this space, but, I haven't seen any real evidence that any other software is significantly better.   The closest I've seen is something like Tebis, where it will literally take a large mold for surfacing and just split it into 6 individual squares to process.   You can get the same sort of thing in Mastercam, but you have to manually do it.

As always, clock speed is king here.

[crazy^millman]

14 hours ago, Greg Williams said:

The grass is not much greaner over there, there are a few spikes but not too many

But an end user can build their posts and machine simulations allowing them a future should they run into an company that changes their business model to match AD.

[#Rekd™]

3 hours ago, Aaron Eberhard said:

I won't say that Mastercam is the best in this space, but, I haven't seen any real evidence that any other software is significantly better.   The closest I've seen is something like Tebis

I asked this vs NX but was wondering how the file sizes compare? Just wondering if some software is better at managing the data vs others.

[JParis]

Let me sum this up...

A new person creates an account....new person gripes about software in 1st...doesn't really offer anything for people to evaluate...

2nd post....proclaims company(not person posting) is going with a different (**insert software title here**)...

Poster not likely to return or ever post anything to evaluate...

 

[rgrin]

Something I am just noticing.  When I first launch MCAM 24 and open a file, my ram usage is at 8gb out of 32.  As I tweak toolpaths, my usage goes up like .5gb every time I regen a toolpath and doesn't go back down after it's finished generating. This happens every time until my computer runs out of memory.  Then mastercam slows to a crawl until I restart it.  Then the cycle starts over again.

 

Is there a setting that allows/changes the amount of data mastercam is able to store in a buffer?  It would be nice to not slowly runout of RAM as I am camming and need to restart....

[捕风捉影]

  This may be related to your diagram and the toolpath strategy, try to use the multi-axis strategy as the toolpath in the complex graph, this toolpath is a program written by me using the multi-axis unified strategy in Mastercam2024

Edited yesterday at 02:25 PM by 捕风捉影

[SuperHoneyBadger]

5 minutes ago, rgrin said:

Something I am just noticing.  When I first launch MCAM 24 and open a file, my ram usage is at 8gb out of 32.  As I tweak toolpaths, my usage goes up like .5gb every time I regen a toolpath and doesn't go back down after it's finished generating. This happens every time until my computer runs out of memory.  Then mastercam slows to a crawl until I restart it.  Then the cycle starts over again.

 

Is there a setting that allows/changes the amount of data mastercam is able to store in a buffer?  It would be nice to not slowly runout of RAM as I am camming and need to restart....

I have 2 instances open and 1 verify window, I'm barely scraping 1.5GB ram usage... I'm running 16GB on this machine, and have never seen any issues like that even with 5-10 instances of MC24 open, I hope someone can shed light on your situation. I just combed through and can't see any obvious RAM limit choices.

Are your parts like, super huge, senpai? Maybe I run baby parts, and my experience is invalid.

[rgrin]

My file size is closing in on 40MB which is prolly biggish?  It still seems odd that every time I tweak a toolpath, my ram usage goes up by .5gb-1gb and doesn't go back.  Just keeps slowly ramping up until I close MCAM.  I caught it at 25gb out of 32 and then restarted MCAM and opened the same file and it idled down at 8gb.

 

Could have something due to us saving parts on our server? I know there can be weird issues with MCAM and servers

 

There is this memory buffering setting.  Maybe I need to set that to a lower value?

[JParis]

3 minutes ago, rgrin said:

My file size is closing in on 40MB which is prolly biggish? 

lol....that's around my starting file size....many of mine get up over 400megs...

[Aaron Eberhard]

23 minutes ago, rgrin said:

Something I am just noticing.  When I first launch MCAM 24 and open a file, my ram usage is at 8gb out of 32.  As I tweak toolpaths, my usage goes up like .5gb every time I regen a toolpath and doesn't go back down after it's finished generating. This happens every time until my computer runs out of memory.  Then mastercam slows to a crawl until I restart it.  Then the cycle starts over again.

 

Is there a setting that allows/changes the amount of data mastercam is able to store in a buffer?  It would be nice to not slowly runout of RAM as I am camming and need to restart....

11 minutes ago, SuperHoneyBadger said:

I have 2 instances open and 1 verify window, I'm barely scraping 1.5GB ram usage... I'm running 16GB on this machine, and have never seen any issues like that even with 5-10 instances of MC24 open, I hope someone can shed light on your situation. I just combed through and can't see any obvious RAM limit choices.

Are your parts like, super huge, senpai? Maybe I run baby parts, and my experience is invalid.

Yeah, that sounds really odd..  I've had multiple versions & instances of Mastercam open for a week with no problems like that.    I'm currently on my third day of uptime, and I have a few 200Mb files open, one ~60Mb, and a small one in 2025 and here's why utilization is currently sitting at  <note, i can't post a picture as I'm out of space> :

2024 : 1,033MB

2024: 986.8MB

2024: 913.9MB

2025: 697MB

I did restart two days ago, though, as I shut down the computer when I travel...

15 minutes ago, 捕风捉影 said:

  This may be related to your diagram and the toolpath strategy, try to use the multi-axis strategy as the toolpath in the complex graph, this toolpath is a program written by me using the multi-axis unified strategy in Mastercam2024

Yep, a surfacing toolpath can utilize the proccessor cores more effectively than volumetric removal toolpath (like Opti).    Each "slice" of the toolpath can be calculated independently as long as you do a one-way or zig-zag pattern.  If you switch it to a spiral, you'll see it go back to maxing one core.

[gcode]

31 minutes ago, rgrin said:

Is there a setting that allows/changes the amount of data mastercam is able to store in a buffer?  It would be nice to not slowly runout of RAM as I am camming and need to restart....

yes

I typically run at 50-70% with this setting

This machine is a Boxx refurb that came with 196g of ram. I'd have never bought this much ram on purpose

but we needed a machine immediately ... and this one shipped air freight next day 30 minutes after I placed the PO. It was under my desk

22 hours after we ordered it.

Mastercam will not run properly with memory buffering set at 70% of 196gig. 

20 minutes ago, JParis said:

lol....that's around my starting file size....many of mine get up over 400megs...

I just finished a large impeller 

It started as a 4500 pound forging and the finished part weighs 1100 pounds.

The finish 5X mill op was 750meg.

[Cavi Mike]

1 hour ago, JParis said:

Let me sum this up...

A new person creates an account....new person gripes about software in 1st...doesn't really offer anything for people to evaluate...

2nd post....proclaims company(not person posting) is going with a different (**insert software title here**)...

Poster not likely to return or ever post anything to evaluate...

 

I love how you guys constantly blame the user for not only the faults of MC but also the faults of yourselves. It's not his fault MC hasn't done a single thing about its terrible resource utilization. Just because processors were all single-core back in the day doesn't mean MC can't spend some time adapting it for multi-core processors. Multi-core processors have been the norm for like 20 years now. Yet another user lost to Siemens.

[JParis]

5 minutes ago, Cavi Mike said:

I love how you guys constantly blame the user for not only the faults of MC but also the faults of yourselves. It's not his fault MC hasn't done a single thing about its terrible resource utilization. Just because processors were all single-core back in the day doesn't mean MC can't spend some time adapting it for multi-core processors. Multi-core processors have been the norm for like 20 years now. Yet another user lost to Siemens.

You completely missed the point....

Read my reply again...

[Aaron Eberhard]

15 minutes ago, Cavi Mike said:

I love how you guys constantly blame the user for not only the faults of MC but also the faults of yourselves. It's not his fault MC hasn't done a single thing about its terrible resource utilization. Just because processors were all single-core back in the day doesn't mean MC can't spend some time adapting it for multi-core processors. Multi-core processors have been the norm for like 20 years now. Yet another user lost to Siemens.

Honest question:  Did you read the thread and the replies? 

[crazy^millman]

2 hours ago, Cavi Mike said:

I love how you guys constantly blame the user for not only the faults of MC but also the faults of yourselves. It's not his fault MC hasn't done a single thing about its terrible resource utilization. Just because processors were all single-core back in the day doesn't mean MC can't spend some time adapting it for multi-core processors. Multi-core processors have been the norm for like 20 years now. Yet another user lost to Siemens.

Can I get some of what you are drinking?

Please show me anywhere in this thread where anyone blamed the user?

We agree it(Mastercam) needs to be better and think it is not using them(Cores) the best way!!

Are you just trying to make an argument out of nothing?

[rgrin]

Some new info.

 

I opened a different file and started regenning toolpaths.  Memory usage did not climb at all.

Reopened the problem file and started regenning. Memory usage started to climb....

 

Corrupted file or something?