How to torture a multicore?

[HalfMadDad]

I bought a I7, 7 core based computer(4G RAM). I am disappointed with the performance so for(on Fedora 14 64 bit). No matter what I do I can't seem to get the cores above about 20% useage all at once. I can get one or two up higher(80% -ish) yet the response of the GUI is slowed down with just one or two cores at this high-ish rate. Is it possible that this is an issue with Fedora? or do you have any hardware suggestions to look for the bottleneck that is? Is there another Distro that might work better?

Thanks for reading-Patrick

[oz]

No matter what I do I can't seem to get the cores above about 20% useage all at once.

Hello and welcome to the forums!

Check out the Parted Magic LiveCD. It comes with several stress apps that might work well enough for your purpose. I personally like using systester for stressing CPUs, and it's included on the liveCD.

[devils casper]

I can get one or two up higher(80% -ish) yet the response of the GUI is slowed down with just one or two cores at this high-ish rate.

Hi and Welcome !

Have you configured Graphics Card correctly? Wrong graphics driver and settings slow down GUI most of the time.

[HalfMadDad]

Sorry for the slow reply. My hard drive died during a backup yesterday and my kid is sick.

Hi Devils casper. I will double check my video settings. I am running a dual monitor setup so this could be problematic.

Hi Ozar
Thanks for pointing me to parted magic, it's awesome! The tests I have already run have ruled out CPU issues, perhaps the trouble is hard drive oriented.

I also want to correct myself, the I7 is 4 cores..

Thanks again guys!-Patrick

[oz]

I also want to correct myself, the I7 is 4 cores..

Right... I think all the Intel i7 CPUs are 2, 4, or 6 cores, depending on the specific model that you have.

[Rubberman]

I don't know about Fedora, but running RHEL/Scientific Linux 6 on my 8 core system (nVidia 8800GT video w/ dual 1920x1200 displays), everything is snappy, even when I am stressing the system, such as building a new kernel with 8 jobs running in parallel - all 8 cores are at 100% utilization for up to 1/2 hour. Using the proprietary nVidia driver is really important if that is the video hardware you have (you don't say). The default open source video drivers are not the most efficient, and if you are using (for nVidia hardware) the Nouveau driver, there are known bugs of this type, and the system will freeze from time to time.

[HalfMadDad]

Hi Rubberman

Thanks for sharing your setup. I've managed for years with underpowered computers so it's great to get tips and feedback about powerful ones. Scientific Linux look really interesting too-Patrick

[Rubberman]

I switched to SL6 from CentOS 5.5 because I needed the better hardware support the newer kernels have for thermal sensors, wireless (including bluetooth for my headset), etc. Unfortunately, the CentOS team has fallen down on the job of getting CentOS 6 out the door, so I went with SL6 which is also an RHEL6 clone. I also have the advantage of knowing a bunch of the SL6 maintainers at Fermi Lab where my wife is a staff physicist, so I can email them directly with problems I encounter, and get an answer in a day or so. So far, pretty much no problems. I used to run KDE on CentOS, but KDE 4 is a disaster as far as I can tell, so I am running on Gnome, but still using a number of KDE tools. They happily live together. Most stuff runs better on SL6, and there are only one or two issues I still have to sort out, but that is very much a background process, such as getting my ARM processor tool chain working. Maybe I'll do that tonight! I have it running on my Ubuntu laptop, so it isn't a major problem for me, but something to deal with - I'll be doing more embedded Linux ARM development in the near term, so I need the tools running on my most productive system.