Machine very sluggish while compiling

[Mike]

Hi Ryan,

Ryan Johnson wrote:
> Lately I've noticed that running make -j4 on my quad-core win7-x64 
> machine causes it to become sluggish or even unresponsive. For example, 
> compiling a large package makes the mouse jumpy, delays keystrokes, adds 
> stutter to my music, and makes task switching painfully slow (though, 
> oddly, if I manage to switch to the mintty that runs make the machine 
> "comes back"). The sluggishness always hits when I'm using a native 
> windows app with the compile running in the background. This starts to 
> sound oddly like the recently-reported issue where X was causing native 
> windows apps to freeze [1].
> 
> I'm not seeing any fork failures, and am running BLODA-free (Windows 
> Defender hasn't reappeared since I last uninstalled it). There's no 
> unusual disk activity and memory utilization remains stable. I've tried 
> running with nice, reducing the priority of 'make' from the task 
> manager, and running make -j3 to no avail, though empirically if 
> utilization stays at or below 2 cpu then there's no problem. I've 
> compiled large apps (gcc, binutils, emacs, gdb, ...) off and on for 
> several years now and never seen this behavior before.
> 
> Any ideas of how I might diagnose the issue further? It's easy enough to 
> work around, but compiles take a lot longer with only 1-2 cores instead 
> of 4.

I've seen problems like this caused by viruses. Process Explorer might 
give you more detailed info:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/sysinternals/bb896653

Perhaps you are using a different version of bash or other shell? Some 
versions have been known to bog down the system as you describe.
Search for  bash slow  might yield some clues:
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/

-- 

Regards,
        Mike

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