PreForm: CPU usage

Preform needs minimum 13% of CPU power, even when idle. With a 8 core CPU, this is one core at 100% all the time!
Why? And is this necessary?

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This doesn’t sound right
 13% of CPU is of ONE CPU- an 8 core machine has EIGHT CPU’s

At present, aside from a handful of specialty apps like rendering engines and scientific applications, nearly no apps are capable of utilizing more than 2 CPUs at once. My modeling app, Freefrom, Uses one full CPU for the modeling space- and a second CPU to run the haptic feedback to the arm.

Photoshop can employ a second CPU when running a filter operation.

Multiple cores basically only buys you the ability to run several apps concurrently and have each use a separate CPU- but in practice, most apps can not tell other software is using a given CPU and do not actually allocate themselves to an idle CPU.

Multi-core machines are largely a scam for making it look like computers are still getting more powerful- to spur sales- But mutlithreading a software app is a non-trivial problem that has only been solved for a very narrow range of software applications.

PS- and, yes
 juggling millons of polygons in 3D space and slicing it into cross sections with laser paths is among the most intensive things you can ask a computer to do.

I can do almost everything from Photoshop to film editing on my iPad.

For professional 3D modeling, I need a machine with at least 2 xeon cores, 64 gb of RAM, and a P series Nvidia quadro card that cost as much as the entire computer.

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@JohnK42 This is on Windows, correct?

We actually just recently found an issue on Windows (doesn’t happen on Mac) that matches your description “one core always used at 100%”, and we think we have fixed it in the next PreForm release, so stay tuned!

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Thanks for your reply, that gives hope.

Yes, Windows 7

Same thing here, 8% on an 12 cores CPU with Win7, even on an empty file.

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Same issue here, Preform 2.20.0 uses at least 10% of CPU even when empty and doing nothing. Complex models (calculating printability / time etc) can peg a core i9 latest gen CPU to 100%, that’s all cores.

Logged a support ticket. Been a software engineer for decades, hate to rush to judgement but I smell a bug.

I notice there’s a 3.0.0 release this morning. Hopefully this bug has been fixed.

Issue fixed in 3.0.0 :smiley:

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Doesn’t appear to be fixed in 3.0.0 :unamused:
This is with a file loaded but I’ve not asked it to generate supports or anything like that


Intel Core i7. Windows 10

@mrwakefield is PreForm doing any Printability calculations while it is using that CPU? It will still use CPU during those.

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Thanks for the quick response. No, it’s finished its Printability calcs.

On Win7 I see high CPU usage right after opening a file but it drops to 0 once the print ability check is done.

@mrwakefield if you are still seeing this, could you please open a ticket with Customer Support? https://support.formlabs.com/s/contact-support?language=en_US

They’ll make sure to collect the right info from you so that we can debug it (full system DxDiag, .form file, PreForm log file). Please make sure to ask them to notify Grant from Software too.

Hi Grant.
Yes I’m still seeing it around 80%-90% of the time I’d say. Before I open any files it seems to behave itself; consuming between 0% & 0.2% processor or thereabouts. Then most times after opening a file (any file it seems) it will consume around 60%-90% processor even after it’s finished its printability calcs. Even if I then do a ‘File|New’ it will continue to consume the same 60%-90% processor even though it’s an empty file! The remaining 20% of the time I can open the same file and after it has finished doing it’s printability calcs it will consume almost no processor.

I’ll raise a support ticket and make sure I ask them to notify you as you’ve requested.
Thanks for your help.

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