Tag Archives: performance

Monitoring GPU usage

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If you (like me) happen to be the performance freak, most likely you are well aware of process viewers like htop. Since I’ve started working with GPU-computing I missed htop-like tool tailored to monitor GPU usage. This is becoming more of an issue if you’re working in multi-GPU setups.

You can use `nvidia-smi` which is shipped with NVIDIA drivers, but it’s not very interactive.

gpustat provide nice and interactive view of the processes running and resources used across your GPUs, but you’ll need to switch between windows if you want to also monitor CPU usage. 

pip install -U gpustat
gpustat -i

Some time ago I’ve discovered glances – really powerful htop replacement. What’s best about glances (at least for me) is that beside I/O and information from sensors, you can see GPU usage. This is done thanks to py3nvml. 

pip install -U glances py3nvml
glances

At first glances window may look a bit overwhelming, but after a few uses you’ll likely fell in love with it!

And what’s your favorite GPU process viewer?

Speeding up TAR.GZ compression with PIGZ

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Most of you probably noticed TAR.GZ compression isn’t very fast. Recently, during routine system backup I have realised TAR.GZ is limited not by disk read/write, but GZIP compression (98% of computation).

time sudo tar cpfz backup/ubuntu1404.tgz --one-file-system /

real 6m20.999s
user 6m1.800s
sys  0m19.043s

GZIP in its standard implementation is single CPU bound, while most of modern computers can run 4-8 threads concurrently. But there are also multi-core implementations of GZIP ie. PIGZ. I have decided to install PIGZ and plug it with TAR as follows:

sudo apt-get install lbzip2 pigz

time sudo tar cpf backup/ubuntu1404.pigz.tgz --one-file-system --use-compress-program=pigz /

real 1m43.693s
user 8m34.168s
sys  0m20.243s

As you can see, TAR.GZ using PIGZ on 4-cores i7-4770k (using 8 threads) is 2.5 times faster than GZIP! And you get standard TAR.GZ archive as output:)

The same applies to BZIP2 compression using LBZIP2.