Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

Hi everyone:

I have what I hope to be an unusual problem.  It turns out that QI is taking 100% CPU on all my available cores (4 in my case).  This has just recently started happening.

It is quite repeatable: launch Task Manager, CPUs are effectively idle, launch QI, CPUs go to 100% usage and stay there, quit QI, CPUs come back down.  Looking in the process list indeed shows qimage.exe as the process consuming all the CPU.

I tried this on .127 and .128 - no difference.


Any hints as to what might be wrong here?  This has just started probably a week ago.

Ron
Westland, Michigan

Ron the heaviest usage of a CPU from Qimage is when it is building cache files, 4 at a time, using all 4 cores.

Try this:
While running Qimage, open Task manager/ processes, find Qimage.exe and Right click on it.
From the drop down menu, select AFFINITY.
Make sure there is a check in every one of the 8 boxes.

I assume that you checked Qimage/ Edit/ Preferences/Hyper Processing/Hyper Thumbing/ set to Quad.


Let us know.
Fred

That was most certainly the problem.  When set to use every cpu/core in the system, it can drag the system down heavily (which in my case - it did: QI was running so sluggish as to become unresponsive).  I set QI back to use only 2 of my 4 cores for thumbnail building and now at least the system is usable when QI launches.

How many threads are you launching on a 4 core system anyhow?  More than 8?

I am a bit confused by your answer.
The more cores and threads that are running, the faster the job gets done, and Qimage only works your computer when making a print file, or building cache files and thumbs.
I suspect insufficient resources, and/or other programs running in the background.
Qimage will build thumbs and cache for the number of shots in the current open folder. AND IT DOES THAT ONE TIME ONLY!
Even with 100 images to process, it only needs 3 or 4 minutes. After that, Qimage rests and does the menial chores of refine, edit, placement, etc.

fred

Fred:

You are welcome to do a Teamviewer session to my computer and see the problem for yourself if you like.  Email me from your ddisoftware account for the teamviewer credentials.

Ron

Hi Ron,
Tell us about your PC processor, ram etc.
See attached screen shot, my CPU is no more than 40% when building cache.
You can see the processor details there too: CPU runs at 39%.
My dual core 2GHz laptop is slower and the CPU runs at 60-70% with and occasional peak at 100%.

From that it seems as though you PC is low on hardware resources but I'm not an expert on that.

So, Tell us about your PC processor, ram etc.

Terry

Mine runs 45-51% while building....

Fred

I am no expert on W7 operation, but in the past on XP and before, when too much  RAM was in use, Windows would write to the Hard drive as a temporary substitute for insufficient RAM
Fred

Everyone will get a different number, based on how many cores your system has available.  QU uses up to 4 cores so if you have a 4 core system, QU defaults to getting the job (printing or cache building) done as quickly as possible.  I have an older quad core system so mine shows 85% to 95% CPU while the cache is building.  The QU threads are marked "lower" priority though so they will move out of the way if you start other tasks while it is working.  The system will obviously not run as if nothing else is going on, but you should still be able to get things done (I can).  But that's why you have the choice.  As you already discovered, just set it to 2 (dual core) if you'd rather not allocate as much CPU to QU and you like to do other things at the same time: problem solved.

Also, as Fred said, it's only going to take that much CPU the first time it builds the thumbs and cache for a particular folder so this should not be an issue every time you open QU if you let it finish the cache building once.  From that point forward, it'll use zero CPU after you open QU... until you perform a task like printing, etc.

Mike