Question

I’ve written a C++ library that does some seriously heavy CPU work (all of it math and calculations) and if left to its own devices, will easily consume 100% of all available CPU resources (it’s also multithreaded to the number of available logical cores on the machine).

As such, I have a callback inside the main calculation loop that software using the library is supposed to call:

while(true)
{
    //do math here
    callback(percent_complete);
}

In the callback, the client calls Sleep(x) to slow down the thread.

Originally, the clientside code was a fixed Sleep(100) call, but this led to bad unreliable performance because some machines finish the math faster than others, but the sleep is the same on all machines. So now the client checks the system time, and if more than 1 second has passed (which == several iterations), it will sleep for half a second.

Is this an acceptable way of slowing down a thread? Should I be using a semaphore/mutex instead of Sleep() in order to maximize performance? Is sleeping x milliseconds for each 1 second of processing work fine or is there something wrong that I’m not noticing?

The reason I ask is that the machine still gets heavily bogged down even though taskman shows the process taking up ~10% of the CPU. I’ve already explored hard disk and memory contention to no avail, so now I’m wondering if the way I’m slowing down the thread is causing this problem.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Sleep should be fine for throttling an app, which from your comments is what you’re after. Perhaps you just need to be more precise how long you sleep for.

The only software in which I use a feature like this is the BOINC client. I don’t know what mechanism it uses, but it’s open-source and multi-platform, so help yourself.

It has a configuration option (“limit CPU use to X%”). The way I’d expect to implement that is to use platform-dependent APIs like clock() or GetSystemTimes(), and compare processor time against elapsed wall clock time. Do a bit of real work, check whether you’re over or under par, and if you’re over par sleep for a while to get back under.

The BOINC client plays nicely with priorities, and doesn’t cause any performance issues for other apps even at 100% max CPU. The reason I use the throttle it is that otherwise, the client runs the CPU flat-out all the time, and drives up the fan speed and noise. So I run it at the level where the fan stays quiet. With better cooling maybe I wouldn’t need it 🙂