Win7 CPU "Parking"

My performance was absolutely horrible last night so I popped open Performance Monitor. I noticed that two of my physical cores were running at 100% and the other two physical cores had a "Parked" status.

So it turns out that Windows 7 parks cores to save on power. Not sure how it decides whether to park cores or not but WoW was unplayable.

I found the following thread with details on how to disable core parking, requires registry changes, use at your own risk:
http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?m=1861804

I am using KeyClone and all 4 physical cores are selected for the CPU affinity but I still got cores parked.

Make sure you have cpu affinity properly set in your config files. I've never had an issue with ''parking''.

Very strange. I have Win7 here on a Q9550 at work and I never see a core go into "parked" mode, even though the value was set to 100% parking available. I work in OS Test here. Lemme see if I can find out some more about this as I'm sure there are certain caveats to default versus disabled.

According to Microsoft it depends on power settings. If you select the "high performance" plan, parking doesn't happen.

I.e. parking is a power-saving feature.

I haven't tested this ... it's just what I've read.

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Originally Posted by Freddie

According to Microsoft it depends on power settings. If you select the "high performance" plan, parking doesn't happen.

I.e. parking is a power-saving feature.

I haven't tested this ... it's just what I've read.

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I read that as well and checked my power settings, it was set to "High Performance" which should have core parking disabled.

Maybe Win7 is like Vista, in that the power settings you pick mean nothing at all, unless you make a registry change.

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Originally Posted by thinus

I read that as well and checked my power settings, it was set to "High Performance" which should have core parking disabled.

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What about the sub-settings for "High Performance?" I think you have to press Advanced to get to them. Is parking itemized there?

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Originally Posted by Freddie

What about the sub-settings for "High Performance?" I think you have to press Advanced to get to them. Is parking itemized there?

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No, it isn't. Only throttling. We're quickly getting into "I don't think that means what you think it means" territory here and I haven't found a good writeup on the basics behind the three different processor/thread optimizations that apply here vis-a-vis multiboxing performance in Dalaran. If I find one, I'll forward it along. I'd write up a quick one but I'm sleep deprived (babysitting cats this week and those bitches are NEEDY).

Interesting. I just skimmed the documentation for the Win32 API for controlling this stuff programmatically to see if the setting is there. The API is incredibly complicated.

When I get time I'll try to add a setting to Mojo so the user can check a box and Mojo will disable parking while it's running.

It's going to have a bunch of performance settings like that.

my i7 920 is doing something similar to the same thing, with ht on wow will always use only 1 core per client, but i i only open 1 client (withouth keyclone) it will use a physicall and logical (2 cores). and all my settings are on high perf wil all power saving bs off, if i wanna save power i'll turn the thing off. currently i have my affinity set as 1 (0-1), 2 (2-3), 3 (4-5), 4 (6-7), 5 (4-6) i also tried splitting them 1(0-2), 2 (1-3), 3 (4-6), 4 (5-7), 5 (4-6) and it still only uses a single core. my performance isn't bad at all im getting 60+ frames on main client (mon1) and have the slaves clipped at 25 2x2 on mon2. got all the eye candy turned on on main at 1440*900 and slaves running at 720*450 everything on lowest.

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Originally Posted by jstanthr

my i7 920 is doing something similar to the same thing, with ht on wow will always use only 1 core per client, but i i only open 1 client (withouth keyclone) it will use a physicall and logical (2 cores). and all my settings are on high perf wil all power saving bs off, if i wanna save power i'll turn the thing off. currently i have my affinity set as 1 (0-1), 2 (2-3), 3 (4-5), 4 (6-7), 5 (4-6) i also tried splitting them 1(0-2), 2 (1-3), 3 (4-6), 4 (5-7), 5 (4-6) and it still only uses a single core. my performance isn't bad at all im getting 60+ frames on main client (mon1) and have the slaves clipped at 25 2x2 on mon2. got all the eye candy turned on on main at 1440*900 and slaves running at 720*450 everything on lowest.

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While your system may still be stable, I am curious as to why win 7 is doing this...any work around?

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Originally Posted by jstanthr

my i7 920 is doing something similar to the same thing, with ht on wow will always use only 1 core per client, but i i only open 1 client (withouth keyclone) it will use a physicall and logical (2 cores). and all my settings are on high perf wil all power saving bs off, if i wanna save power i'll turn the thing off. currently i have my affinity set as 1 (0-1), 2 (2-3), 3 (4-5), 4 (6-7), 5 (4-6) i also tried splitting them 1(0-2), 2 (1-3), 3 (4-6), 4 (5-7), 5 (4-6) and it still only uses a single core. my performance isn't bad at all im getting 60+ frames on main client (mon1) and have the slaves clipped at 25 2x2 on mon2. got all the eye candy turned on on main at 1440*900 and slaves running at 720*450 everything on lowest.

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I think the Physical cores are the odd numbers. So using (4-6) on toon 5 might be a problem. I always edit the config file to set affinty to 255.

Use cores 1,3,5, and 7 (for physical cores, then add in logical) if you are using a quad core with hyper threading.