Re: Machine very sluggish while compiling

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

On 24/11/2011 11:06 PM, Mike wrote:
> Hi Ryan,
>
> Ryan Johnson wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I've seen problems like this caused by viruses. Process Explorer might 
> give you more detailed info:
> http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/sysinternals/bb896653
I've used Process Explorer several times in the past, but it's not 
immediately obvious to me what I should be using it to look for. 
Suspicious dlls? I keep my machine patched, regularly check my process 
list for suspicious/unfamiliar entries, and have not had a virus in 
roughly 8 years (and that one was thanks to my sister in-law borrowing 
the machine). I can't rule out a rootkit infection, but PE wouldn't be 
any help there anyway.

> Perhaps you are using a different version of bash or other shell? Some 
> versions have been known to bog down the system as you describe.
> Search for  bash slow  might yield some clues:
> http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/
Latest version of cygwin's bash, bash-completions package is not 
installed. Also, make+compilation seems to proceed at normal speed the 
whole time... it's everybody else that suffers.

BTW, thanks for the ideas, they're definitely solid sanity checks.

Regards,
Ryan



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