Strange ALT 1 Sim CPU report?

Okay... I have seen previous posts that say that a .5 SIM CPU value in the ALT 1 Simulator report is a valid one. I have even seen that .25 and 1 are valid.

What does a .5 dropping down to .4 mean? I thought the .5 was an indication that one was on a hyperthreaded cpu and you were getting one half/one thread?

The current sim server number is sim298.agni....

Note: This first became of interest to me when my client fps dropped inexplicably to <3 even when I was looking out into a void sim!

Korg, the Sim CPU number is actually an artifact of the way Linux reports CPU usage.

Any given sim takes all the CPU it's allowed; it never goes idle. It's always busy. For a long time, LL ran one sim on one P3 or P4 machine, so the Sim CPU usage would pretty much always be 1.000.

Starting a few months ago, they began deploying dual Opterons. Each dual CPU machine runs two sims, one per processor. Because of how Linux reports load, each sim reports that it is taking 0.50 of the available CPU. This is, of course, true.... it's taking all it can of one CPU, but that's only half the load on the total box.

Some of the 'blue' sims, the empty water ones, are loaded up 3 and 4 to a CPU. In theory, I suppose you could see a CPU usage as low as 0.1250, if a dual CPU box were running eight of those mostly-empty sims.

However, you seeing a .40 CPU is odd. It should, normally, be the result of dividing an integer into 1... ie, 1, 0.5, 0.33, 0.2, 0.1250. 0.4 is a strange value, and leads me to believe the sim was either crashing or hobbled by the fouled-up databases.

HTH.

Trimming, that's what I thought -- the successive "halving" of "1" thing corresponding to the (# of/work of the) cpu somehow.

So, when I lagged and looked at the Simulator stats, the .4 really stood out as it wasn't "supposed" to be there mathematically.

Anyway, thanks for the response.

After attending a party today and watching Alt-1 like always, I stayed dancing with 35 other people watching my fps drop to a slide show of 1.4, to watching the Time dilation drop from 1 down to .80 which means we slowed time down woo hoo LOL, at any rate, the Sim FPS was down to a meager 32 at one point and the Sim CPU was struggling to keep up so much it was dropping from .5 down to .45 and lower into .3's. I imagine part of this was the running Agents was topping off at 80% wow huh? But did I have fun, you betcha! So Sim CPU not at .5 all the time sure, there's bound to be background apps runnings, perhaps it performed a backup? who knows If anything at least it's working

I'd have to be on the box itself to be sure, but one thought that occurs... it might be that the box starts to swap, and the CPU drops because the box is spending more and more time swapping and less and less time actually running code. Either the CPU is taken by the kernel swapping, or else the sim code blocks on I/O and sleeps when it normally wouldn't.

Just a thought. If you only see the non-even numbers when a sim is under very heavy load, that would tend to support this idea.

that's probably right, .4 would indicate something other than a simulator is eating a significant portion of the sys. resources

could it be kazaa? or an opengl screensaver?

Maybe it's a subspace pocket.

Kidding, kidding.