Great explanation, Brecht - thanks ! John
On 28/05/2018 12:40, Brecht Van Lommel wrote:
Hi, We use SetThreadGroupAffinity() for systems with more than 64 cores, without that it doesn't use all the cores. SetThreadAffinityMask() is a hint to the operating system scheduler, which can improve performance by some % due to fewer context switches or better memory location for example. If you have just a single process with a single thread pool with the same amount of threads and cores a hint can help. But if you have multiple processes, multiple thread pools, external renderers doing their own threading, ... then the optimal scheduling is not so obvious and giving the wrong hints can cause higher priority tasks to be slowed. Adding affinity may still help, but it would need detailed benchmarking, and even then it's a bit risky because it might be worse in some corner cases we didn't predict. Generally the operating system scheduler does a good job, and these schedulers have gotten better in newer operating systems too. Regards, Brecht. On Mon, May 28, 2018 at 12:15 PM, John Emmas <[email protected]> wrote:Hi guys - forgive me asking a trivial question. It's just something I noticed in the Blender code... I'm involved mostly in audio products where we often use multiple threads to run things like the processing stuff (plugins etc). On Windows we'll call functions like 'SetThreadAffinityMask()' or 'SetThreadIdealProcessor()' to ensure that multiple threads get run on different CPU cores which gives an element of parallel processing (assuming there's enough cores available). But looking through the Blender code it seems like you've chosen a different approach ('SetThreadGroupAffinity()'). I might be misunderstanding something but AFAICT that'll assign threads to a processor group (rather than any individual processor). So it won't necessarily promote parallel processing. Or isn't that the reason? Do you use that approach because it offers some other benefit? Like I said, I'm just curious really... John _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers_______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
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