Dual Processor utilization?

[Bruce Kanzelmeyer]

Are there any adjustments or setup parameters in MCX that will allow it to better utilize a dual processor box? I have been verifying a toolpath since before lunch yesterday and apparently MC is only using 50% of my computer's processor power. The mastercam.exe processor affinity has both CPU0 and CPU1 checked but apparently is still only utilizing 1 of them. Any thoughts on this? Thanks.

[Guest]

not sure on this one but i dont think x will use dual processors. that being said i think if you set

affinity to 1 for mcam it may run a little faster as your os will use processor 0 first????

those that are more knowledgeable please jump in. am curious as well

Doug

[Ed@Elite]

Do you have a true Dual Core CPU or one with Hyperthreading? Cause if you have Hyperthreading you can usually turn it off in the bios.

[Scott Sizemore]

MasterCam itself doesn't truly use dual processing. If your verify is been running since yesterday I would make sure you switch to turbo on verify and make sure your speed is turned up all the way.

[beej]

quote:

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Do you have a true Dual Core CPU or one with Hyperthreading? Cause if you have Hyperthreading you can usually turn it off in the bios.

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Are you saying that hyperthreading is bad for mastercam? because I have a dual with hyperthreading that makes it look like I have 4 processors.

 

Does it make a difference if hyperthreading is on or off?

[Craig Madsen from CM3D]

Beej,

 

It makes a difference. Hyperthreading has the POTENTIAL to be faster, but every test I ran seems to indicate that for Mastercam it isn't.

 

When you turn on Hyperthreading the system splits the external cache for use by the CPU - This is great for web pages and small files which is what INTEL expected to be used the most with their processors. But on large/complicated files such as Mastercam uses, the larger cache works much better.

 

As for the Dual-core products, I am using a Dual-core Athlon 64x2 4400+, Window XP Professional x64 Edition, on this system. After playing with the affinity and registry settings I would say to just leave it to the OS to pick how to distribute CPU time. It works out about 10-15% better on really large files (over 50megs).

 

It would be much faster if Mastercam had been compiled with switches to support simultaneous tasks. On my Unix boxes (years ago) when the post ran, even on large files, the system spawned a separate task to run the post and I was returned immediately to Mastercam and could get a lot more done while posting 15meg files at the same time. (Back in the day of Pentium 66mhz and 32megs of Ram - now THAT was a smokin' machine at the time).

[Bruce Kanzelmeyer]

Thanks everyone,

 

I am running a true dual processor box, with 2 AMD Opteron 242 processors with 2Gigs of ram running on XP Pro. I guess that 50% utilization is the best I can expect--however, the upside is that I can open up another window of MCX and crunch 2 jobs at once--then I get 100% processor use! Thanks for Turbo tip on verify! the toolpath that took 19 hours to crunch yesterday took 3 minutes this morning!

[beej]

thanks, Craig. Just turned hyperthreading off and I'm anxious to see the results.

[within a thou]

my computer is also a dual processor hyper threaded and I have more problems with V9 then I know what to do with crashes and openening files which will show me thru statistics that thee is entities but nothing on the screen. Also when I close a large 3D which has cutterpaths programmed and then re open it a lot of times my cutterpaths will need to be regenerated and I will have to rechoose all my geometry. Are these computers known to making V9 go screwy or is the problem somewhere else.

 

I have already changed to a Nvidia Quattro FX1300 a gig of ram and the latest drivers. Which were installed in safe mode

 

Right now the computer is set up as a fresh instal only thing I changed was partitioned the drives. Do I need to change other things to factor in the fact I have the 4 cpu's running? Right now my allocations are set to use 800 megs is that to high?

 

My hardware acceleration for the graphic card is turned off also.

[Bullines]

quote:

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It would be much faster if Mastercam had been compiled with switches to support simultaneous tasks.

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If only it were as simple as specifiying a few switches to the compiler; it's not. Mutlithreaded programming is a whole other beast and implementing it across an entire application as large as Mastercam would take a lot of work.

[TJM2005]

Hyper threading in really useless for any CAM software. We recently got a box with 2 Xeon processors for forming simulation software, so I started looking into how we could improve some of the processing times. The results were really impressive.

 

Mastercam can run 60% faster with hyperthreading turned off. This should really be put on the first page of the installation manual. IN BIG RED LETTERS!!

 

Typical 3D form block processing time with hypertheading: 22 min

 

Without hyperthreading: 13 min.

 

Save about 2 hours a day * 5 seats = over 170K a year at shop rate

[RandyN]

What forming software you runnin g there TJM? I use Dynaform here and have a dual Xeon box to run it on too. I had tried hyperthreading when I first got the new box, but decided having it off was the way to go also.

[Ed@Elite]

Where Hyperthreading comes in handy is when you can process a toolpath in one session of Mastercam and Design in a second session. But I guess it depends on the work you do and the application.

[thoskins]

How do check to see if your box has hyperthreading, and if it does how do you disable it?

[beej]

If you have a single processor in your box. use "task manager" to look at your performance it will look like 2 processors running with hyperthreading turned on. when hypertrheading is turned off it will look like one processor running.

[mrmead]

i have dual opterons in my cpu how can i tell if hyperthreding is on ?

[TJM2005]

Using Dynaform too. You shoul send me and e-mail so we can pick each others brains for some simulation stuff. (tmeszaros at eurospectooling dot com) Runs fast as hell without hyperthreading! Hit Ctrl+Shift+Esc for task manager and click on the performance tab. If you have a single CPU with hyperthreading, you will see two boxes. If you have dual CPU's with hyperthreading, you will see four boxes. You have to get into the BIOS on startup to turn it off.

[mrmead]

checked the bios and "coherant ht " is all i found and it is set to auto but only 2 windows i the task manager.

[thoskins]

Thanks for the info that really sped things up

[Rick46]

Opterons dont utilize hyperthreading.. the use Hyper Transport technology to shuttle data between the processors and other devices...

[mrmead]

thanks sr ,when i googled it i found that out.

thanks for the reply.

is there any way to set the affinity so it will stay .if i shut mc down then start it up it doesnt go back to cpu 1

[Moldmaker74]

quote:

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Where Hyperthreading comes in handy is when you can process a toolpath in one session of Mastercam and Design in a second session. But I guess it depends on the work you do and the application.

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Even so you would still be better turning it off since Hyperthreading limits your CPU usage to 50%. I run two Windows of Mastercam all the time without any memory issues.