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Re: Machine very sluggish while compiling


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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