Machine very sluggish while compiling

[Ryan Johnson <ryan.johnson@cs.utoronto.ca>]

Hi all,

Lately I've noticed that running make -j4 on my quad-core win7-x64 
machine causes it to become sluggish or even unresponsive. For example, 
compiling a large package makes the mouse jumpy, delays keystrokes, adds 
stutter to my music, and makes task switching painfully slow (though, 
oddly, if I manage to switch to the mintty that runs make the machine 
"comes back"). The sluggishness always hits when I'm using a native 
windows app with the compile running in the background. This starts to 
sound oddly like the recently-reported issue where X was causing native 
windows apps to freeze [1].

I'm not seeing any fork failures, and am running BLODA-free (Windows 
Defender hasn't reappeared since I last uninstalled it). There's no 
unusual disk activity and memory utilization remains stable. I've tried 
running with nice, reducing the priority of 'make' from the task 
manager, and running make -j3 to no avail, though empirically if 
utilization stays at or below 2 cpu then there's no problem. I've 
compiled large apps (gcc, binutils, emacs, gdb, ...) off and on for 
several years now and never seen this behavior before.

Any ideas of how I might diagnose the issue further? It's easy enough to 
work around, but compiles take a lot longer with only 1-2 cores instead 
of 4.

Thanks,
Ryan

[1] http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2011-11/msg00027.html



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