aMule Forum

English => aMule Help => Topic started by: cargs on June 12, 2010, 08:14:08 PM

Title: amule on intel atom CPU?
Post by: cargs on June 12, 2010, 08:14:08 PM
Anyone running amule (2.2.6) on intel atom CPU?  I run it on atm 280 (dual core, 1.6ghz) and doesn't look like the cpu can handle it.  amule is always at 100% CPU usage and very slow.
Title: Re: amule on intel atom CPU?
Post by: GonoszTopi on June 12, 2010, 09:40:45 PM
aMule runs perfectly on much slower CPUs. Maybe it's hashing the shares?
Title: Re: amule on intel atom CPU?
Post by: cargs on June 12, 2010, 11:57:12 PM
I found out what's going on.  It looks like top is having trouble dealing with multiple cores.  Using system monitor it shows that aMule is generally maxed out at 25%, basically maxed out on 1 CPU.  System thinks there are 4 CPUs due to Intel Hyper Threading. 

Problem is, running the monolithic version it doesn't seems like aMule makes use (or efficient use) of the other CPUs, so generally the UI is very unresponsive.  Opening preferences takes a long time, and applying changes takes a long time also.  Very often when switch to the aMule window that is showing the transfers, it takes a while for the UI to show and become responsive.

Title: Re: amule on intel atom CPU?
Post by: skolnick on June 13, 2010, 04:40:39 AM
Hmm...strange, I am running aMule SVN on a Pentium 4 without hyperthreading and 768 MB RAM, and aMule works fine. Which OS are you using?
Title: Re: amule on intel atom CPU?
Post by: Stu Redman on June 13, 2010, 03:08:31 PM
aMule doesn't make much use of multiple cores. Most action is just in the main thread. Most of the time aMule should consume very little CPU anyway.
Opening preferences does take a while, but only the first time of a session. This is fixed in current SVN.
What you describe sounds more like a low memory situation to me when memory gets swapped all the time. How much memory do you have, what OS are you running, what else is running, do you have constant harddisc activity?
Title: Re: amule on intel atom CPU?
Post by: cargs on June 14, 2010, 08:38:09 AM
2GB ram on Fedora 11.

All other parts of my system is very responsive.  That's expected since I have another core.  I can't say how CPU intensive is aMule but a single core from an atom is very very weak so if aMule isn't efficiently multi-threaded I could see it hitting a wall on a single atom core.  Also I don't know how the number of downloads is related to CPU usage.  I have about 20 korean soap operas going sometimes.  I've reduced the list to about 8 to see if aMule becomes more responsive.   Also I've done the wipe the whole .aMule directory and start over trick and aMule is still dead in the water while completely occupying a single Atom Core.

I used to run aMule on a very old Athlon XP 2100+ and it was at least bearable, even though it constantly uses a fair share of the CPU.

Title: Re: amule on intel atom CPU?
Post by: Stu Redman on June 14, 2010, 10:02:06 PM
If one core is very very weak two of them won't cut much cheese either.  ;) But amule should run fine on an Atom. With 2GB I see no problem.
Wiping .amule will cause a full rehash of all files on next start. This can take a while. Wait until harddisk activity stops, then CPU should go down too.
Did you compile it yourself ? Did you enable optimize? If not, rebuild with optimize. (Same for wxWidgets.)
20 downloads are no load. With more than 100 it will get slow however.
Title: Re: amule on intel atom CPU?
Post by: cargs on June 15, 2010, 08:24:02 AM
Well, two cores are better than one, even if they are weak. :)  Atom 280 is actually about the same as one of those old Athlon XP 2000+, but I think only if both cores are counted.

I didn't add any file to share after wiping .aMule, but I always wait until there're 0 tasks remaining before I check CPU usage.

I compiled aMule myself, optimization is enabled.  wxWidgets is installed by fedora.

After I reduced download to 8 from 20, aMule UI is at least responding, but still constantly occupying 100% of a single core.  If like you said the number of downloads shouldn't have load then I am not sure what's going on.  I am getting an intel NIC to see if that helps. 

Is there anyway to enable some logs to see what aMule is up to?