Yup. always gotta be that one single threaded program. In this case, appears to be frigate.
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
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.
there’s little excuse for not doing it anymore for heavy applications, especially games
… Wut. You chose one of the best examples of where multi-threaded workloads are extremely difficult and often impractical as your example of where it should definitely be used…? 🤦
Games are where it’s the most difficult, nevermind enterprise workloads that can be multi-threaded on paper, while games can often not even make that work in theory. Game workloads are incredibly, almost insurmountably, difficult to multi-threaded for most teams and studios.
Not just from a technical standpoint but from a practical standpoint as well as you are significantly increasing the surface area for software defects, full of pitfalls and gotchas. Sure you can multi-thread your workload but now it actually runs slower than it would have if you never did this at all due to increased resource usage as a result of synchronization…etc
Games like factorio are rarities, where the developers had both a small game and scope, and all the time and resources they needed to produce multi-threaded solutions to their workloads. Engines like unity have ECS, which has limitations of use and comes with extra asterisks. But outside that and a few other examples actual multi-threading is a massive undertakings that may actually mean your Game cannot be delivered.
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”
Multithreading in games is much more difficult because you not only have to make sure, everything is synchronized, but also that everything finishes in time. It’s a bit like a RTOS in that regard. Using a known and fixed amount of threads can be a sane choice.
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!”
No shit. You got garbage collection?
It’ll be sold out in beta aka test in production.
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!
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.
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?
Every ddr4 ram module (8g of ram), uses around 3w. I have 256g of it.
That is 32 modules * 3 = 96 watts.
This is also ECC server ram, might be safe to say, it takes a bit more too.
