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Author Topic: Mach4 hogging CPU time  (Read 1239 times)

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Mach4 hogging CPU time
« on: April 07, 2021, 08:02:03 AM »
I see that Mach4GUI.exe is hogging anything between 40-50% of the CPU time on my PC when booted and idle. The drives aren't even enabled.

Can anyone tell me why this is happening? Surely it should be idle, taking next to no processing power if it's not executing a program?

Out of interest I changed the priority of the process to see how much difference that makes. It still takes over 30% of the CPU time.

Clearly it's very busy doing something, but it's slowing down the PC unnecessarily as far as I can see.

Offline Bill_O

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Re: Mach4 hogging CPU time
« Reply #1 on: April 07, 2021, 12:43:30 PM »
Mine is between 6 and 10 percent
Re: Mach4 hogging CPU time
« Reply #2 on: April 07, 2021, 03:00:37 PM »
That's the sort of figure I would expect. I wonder why it's taking up so much time on my PC?
I've left it sitting there disabled for the past couple of hours, and now it's showing around 20%
Something is clearly changing over time.
« Last Edit: April 07, 2021, 03:02:51 PM by striplar »
Re: Mach4 hogging CPU time
« Reply #3 on: April 07, 2021, 03:08:40 PM »
I5 - 9400F
Running MACH router profile at around 4-8% CPU usage at idle.
With a few thousand line GCODE file it runs about 10% CPU while running.
The CPU you have has a huge bearing on performance :)
Re: Mach4 hogging CPU time
« Reply #4 on: April 07, 2021, 03:16:02 PM »
Well, the PC has the following specification...

AMD Athlon(tm) II X4 640 Processor   3.00 GHz with 8.00 GB of RAM running 64bit Windows 10.

This is like using a dragster engine in a street car. It's using an ESS, so even when it's working, it doesn't have much to do.

Looking at the Task Manager, it's showing Power Usage as High, and the Network is at a constant 0.5Mbps
« Last Edit: April 07, 2021, 03:18:37 PM by striplar »

Offline smurph

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Re: Mach4 hogging CPU time
« Reply #5 on: April 08, 2021, 12:13:45 AM »
Try running Mach with the Simulator plugin as the motion device.  The stock profile Mach4Mill using Sim uses .2% on my PC.  So it will be the motion plugin that is using most of the CPU.  And that stands to good reason.  The ESS uses a default 50Hz (20ms) loop interval and implements a default cycle time of 1 millisecond.  All of this is going one regardless of if the drives and motors are enabled or not.  There is a LOT going on under the hood. 

But the good news is that it isn't hogging 100% of the CPU.  And it still runs fine on my D2700MUD Atom board.

Steve
Re: Mach4 hogging CPU time
« Reply #6 on: April 08, 2021, 05:31:21 AM »
I've just tried that, and it's still taking 7-10% of the CPU time, but it's a lot less than when the ESS is selected. I tried the test with the ESS powered down too, just to make sure it couldn't be communicated with.

That still seems a lot to me since it's not doing anything.