[Wine] 100% CPU usage

[Mark Knecht]

On 11/9/05, Randall Walls <rwalls at gwi.net> wrote:
> 1) No.
>
> 2) Depends on where the issue lies.
>
> Bloody details may help. :-) :-P
>
> What version of wine are you running? Installed via RPM or compiled from
> source? Are you seeing this with all apps or just some? Any notations in
> the terminal? Does running the app with 'WINEDEBUG="-all" wine app.exe'
> have any affect on performance? Does the app/system performance suffer?
> Has Wine always done this or did it just start?
>
> Randall Walls
>
> Mark Knecht wrote:
>
> >Hi,
> >   Without going into all the bloody details we see a number of apps
> >running under Wine-0.9 that take 100% CPU when running.
> >
> >1) Is this expected?
> >
> >2) How can I look more deeply to see what is causing this to happen?
> >
> >We're just using 'top' and looking at usr, sys, etc. and seeing it go
> >to 100%, even when the system is sitting essentially idle.
> >
> >Thanks,
> >Mark
> >

Hi Randall, et all.

The following is a set of simple instructions for anyone willing to
look at the 100% usage problem with me. I am using Wine-0.9 from
Gentoo portage. Another use is using an fc2 RPM file. We both see
identical results.

mkdir SAVITEST
cd SAVITEST

wget http://www.hermannseib.com/programs/savihost.zip
unzip savihost.zip

wget http://www.rgcaudio.com/downloads/freeware/triangle110.exe
wine ./triangle110.exe
(Install into /home/XXX/SAVITEST)

wget http://www.greenoak.com/crystal/dl/Crystal.zip
unzip Crystal.zip

cp savihost.exe Vstplugins/Triangle\ I.exe
cp savihost.exe Crystal.exe

At this point we are setup and ready to run Wine to test things out.
Here's what my test directory looks like:

mark at lightning ~/SAVITEST $ ls -la
total 17400
drwxr-xr-x   3 mark users     4096 Nov  9 11:22 .
drwxr-xr-x  63 mark users     4096 Nov  9 11:17 ..
-rw-rw-rw-   1 mark users 11120640 Mar  5  2005 Crystal.dll
-rw-r--r--   1 mark users   319488 Nov  9 11:22 Crystal.exe
-rw-r--r--   1 mark users  3702635 Mar  5  2005 Crystal.zip
drwxr-xr-x   2 mark users     4096 Nov  9 11:22 Vstplugins
-rw-r--r--   1 mark users     8252 Aug 10 22:25 license.txt
-rw-r--r--   1 mark users   319488 Oct 11 12:54 savihost.exe
-rw-r--r--   1 mark users   136046 Oct 12 10:30 savihost.zip
-rw-r--r--   1 mark users  2153712 May 25  2003 triangle110.exe
mark at lightning ~/SAVITEST $ ls -al Vstplugins/
total 4100
drwxr-xr-x  2 mark users    4096 Nov  9 11:22 .
drwxr-xr-x  3 mark users    4096 Nov  9 11:22 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 mark users 3780608 Jul  2  2001 Triangle I.dll
-rw-r--r--  1 mark users  319488 Nov  9 11:22 Triangle I.exe
-rw-r--r--  1 mark users     753 Nov  9 11:18 unins000.dat
-rwxr-xr-x  1 mark users   71917 Nov  9 11:18 unins000.exe
mark at lightning ~/SAVITEST $

To run the test open a terminal, start top to monitor CPU usage, and
then run Wine on the two copies of Savihost:

mark at lightning ~/SAVITEST $ wine ./Crystal.exe
mark at lightning ~/SAVITEST $ wine ./Vstplugins/Triangle\ I.exe
mark at lightning ~/SAVITEST $

Play the keyboard to hear the instrument. Under the Savihost 'effect'
menu you can change the sound programming of the synth. Watch CPU
usage in top.

Note that we are running the exact same application here -
savihost.exe. It's just renamed to the VST instrument name to tell it
what VSTi instrument to run.On our systems, both 32-bit and 64-bit, we
see about 15% usr, 85% sys when running Crystal, while we see only 5%
usr, 5% sys when running Triangle.

WHY?

We have tried this with many VSTs. It seems that possibly 50% of them
are 100% CPU consumers. This is not isolated to jsut Crystal.dll.

Thanks in advance to anyone willing to participate in this experiment.

Cheers,
Mark