workstation My highest end build ever turned out to be my slowest PC :-(

[FitEyes]

ShadowTechXTS suggested I come ask about my problem here. I just built a high end workstation over on PCPP. It's a nice build. It is a dual Xeon workstation with 128 GB ECC RAM, an NVMe drive for the OS and an nvidia GTX 970.

 

Here are the build details:

Xeon E5-2660 V3 2.6GHz 10-Core, GeForce GTX 970 4GB SSC ACX 2.0+, Define R5 Blackout Edition w/ Window ATX Mid Tower - PCPartPicker
http://pcpartpicker.com/b/r7zMnQ
 

Unfortunately, it has pretty poor desktop GUI & application performance.

 

All applications are very slow to load. For example, Firefox takes about 7-10 seconds to open. All applications are also slow to respond to basic operations. For example, there is a noticeable delay when clicking menu items or opening dialogs. The GUI is generally slow.

 

I notice the slowness in all interactive desktop GUI applications. It is both graphics (resizing windows) and I/O (opening or saving files).

 

I'm attaching some screen captures of me resizing a Firefox window while a Youtube video is playing. Notice how far the mouse cursor is ahead of the window resize and how slow the screen redraw is. But the worst part is how slow application menus respond because I'm constantly doing that type of interaction with the desktop environment.

[PlayStation 2]

And this is a prime example of flinging money away for no reason.

[vanished]

I don't have much for ideas so I'll ask some obvious things if that's alright:

• Are you certain the OS is installed on the SSD?
• Are the video drivers installed?

[FitEyes]

3 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I don't have much for ideas so I'll ask some obvious things if that's alright:

• Are you certain the OS is installed on the SSD?
• Are the video drivers installed?

Yes, I have been troubleshooting for months. Already tried all the obvious stuff.

[spartaman64]

i would guess maybe the motherboard and processors dont support nvme properly?

see if installing the os on a hard drive improves speed

[JefferyD90]

10 minutes ago, FitEyes said:

ShadowTechXTS suggested I come ask about my problem here. I just built a high end workstation over on PCPP. It's a nice build. It is a dual Xeon workstation with 128 GB ECC RAM, an NVMe drive for the OS and an nvidia GTX 970.

 

Here are the build details:

Xeon E5-2660 V3 2.6GHz 10-Core, GeForce GTX 970 4GB SSC ACX 2.0+, Define R5 Blackout Edition w/ Window ATX Mid Tower - PCPartPicker
http://pcpartpicker.com/b/r7zMnQ
 

Unfortunately, it has pretty poor desktop GUI & application performance.

 

All applications are very slow to load. For example, Firefox takes about 7-10 seconds to open. All applications are also slow to respond to basic operations. For example, there is a noticeable delay when clicking menu items or opening dialogs. The GUI is generally slow.

 

I notice the slowness in all interactive desktop GUI applications. It is both graphics (resizing windows) and I/O (opening or saving files).

 

I'm attaching some screen captures of me resizing a Firefox window while a Youtube video is playing. Notice how far the mouse cursor is ahead of the window resize and how slow the screen redraw is. But the worst part is how slow application menus respond because I'm constantly doing that type of interaction with the desktop environment.

I think its bad RAM.

[glengraegill]

did you investigate the chipset of that board before you made that computer, it could be bottle necking the whole thing

[Energycore]

Fire up memtest86+ (it's a bootable application, download the iso then mount it and image it with the included tool into a USB drive) to see if your memory's having problems.

 

Show us numbers on CrystalDiskMark to see if your drive is being slow.

 

Show us a score in a 3DMark Firestrike run so we can compare it to the score of similar graphics solutions (the physics score won't hurt to look at too).

 

And finally, show us a Cinebench score to see if the CPU's the one giving you trouble.

[FitEyes]

6 minutes ago, JefferyD90 said:

I think its bad RAM.

It's ECC RAM. I would be getting ECC errors if the RAM was bad, right?

[Energycore]

1 minute ago, FitEyes said:

It's ECC RAM. I would be getting ECC errors if the RAM was bad, right?

Perhaps the problem is with ECC getting in the way of bandwidth. I couldn't tell you unless you showed us benchmark numbers (AIDA64 has memory benchmarks, so does SiSoftware Sandra, and memtest86+ can look for errors).

[vanished]

9 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

i would guess maybe the motherboard and processors dont support nvme properly?

see if installing the os on a hard drive improves speed

That's an interesting idea.  No need to reinstall the OS though - just run a benchmark on the disk and we can tell you if the speeds seem appropriate or not.  If they are... we keep looking.  If not, that's probably the problem.

[ForsakenLive]

I came here to post very similar suggestions to what Energycore said.

Test the ram (memtest86 is a great tool for it).

Try to benchmark most of the hardware, and see what part is misbehaving.

.

Also, grab a spare HDD you might have laying around, and go for a clean OS install on it, (without your array or your NVMe stuff plugged in). Test how the system performs on a standard hard drive install.

Finally, there could be an issue on windows, about how it handles such computer beast. There might be some tweaks you need to do in order to take fully advantage of all that ram and CPU threads. So just for a quick check, download Ubuntu 16.04 and put it into an spare drive is posible; this way you can see for yourself if the windows OS is having some sort of problem handling the hardware.

 

[spartaman64]

2 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

That's an interesting idea.  No need to reinstall the OS though - just run a benchmark on the disk and we can tell you if the speeds seem appropriate or not.  If they are... we keep looking.  If not, that's probably the problem.

the drive could work but some boards dont support booting off nvme ssds properly if it was a z97 board or something i would say for certain that is the culprit but idk about workstation boards

[Energycore]

Another conjecture is the NVMe SSD not getting enough PCI-E bandwidth because of wrong lane configuration (although UI resizing shouldn't be affected by a slow drive, only I/O responsiveness).

[FitEyes]

29 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

i would guess maybe the motherboard and processors dont support nvme properly?

see if installing the os on a hard drive improves speed

It boots just fine from the NVMe drive. Normally that is the only compatibility issue.

 

Also, see http://serverfault.com/a/678761

 

Quote

NVMe is PCIe based, and using different drivers designed for that. You can essentially take an M2 formfactor NVM, pop it into the appropriate adaptor, and run it on any linux, windows or BSD system with appropriate drivers.

 

[FitEyes]

19 minutes ago, Energycore said:

Another conjecture is the NVMe SSD not getting enough PCI-E bandwidth because of wrong lane configuration (although UI resizing shouldn't be affected by a slow drive, only I/O responsiveness).

hdparm shows read speeds of 1.75 GB/s, so it is getting sufficient bandwidth. I tested the NVMe drive in different PCI slots and there was indeed some difference. But even in the slowest configuration this drive was still very fast (1.3 GB/s) according to "hdparm -tT --direct".

[Energycore]

1 minute ago, FitEyes said:

hdparm shows read speeds of 1.75 GB/s, so it is getting sufficient bandwidth. I tested the NVMe drive in different PCI slots and there was indeed some difference. But even in the slowest configuration this drive was still very fast (1.3 GB/s) according to "hdparm -tT --direct".

Alright, i'd say it's probably a RAM issue. Try out memtest86+ or at least AIDA64's stress test utility.

[FitEyes]

24 minutes ago, ForsakenLive said:

I came here to post very similar suggestions to what Energycore said.

Test the ram (memtest86 is a great tool for it).

Try to benchmark most of the hardware, and see what part is misbehaving.

.

Also, grab a spare HDD you might have laying around, and go for a clean OS install on it, (without your array or your NVMe stuff plugged in). Test how the system performs on a standard hard drive install.

Finally, there could be an issue on windows, about how it handles such computer beast. There might be some tweaks you need to do in order to take fully advantage of all that ram and CPU threads. So just for a quick check, download Ubuntu 16.04 and put it into an spare drive is posible; this way you can see for yourself if the windows OS is having some sort of problem handling the hardware.

 

So far I have tested Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 16.04, opensuse and Arch Linux. I stuck with Arch Linux.

 

This weekend I will probably try a Windows 10 install temporarily. I'll do that on a different drive (such as a SATA HDD).

[ForsakenLive]

1 minute ago, FitEyes said:

So far I have tested Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 16.04, opensuse and Arch Linux. I stuck with Arch Linux.

 

This weekend I will probably try a Windows 10 install temporarily. I'll do that on a different drive (such as a SATA HDD).

I asumed you were on windows already. But yeah, try different configurations to see what is causing it to be slow like that, then you can see what you need to fix in order to get everything working smooth as intended. 

[FitEyes]

32 minutes ago, Energycore said:

Fire up memtest86+ (it's a bootable application, download the iso then mount it and image it with the included tool into a USB drive) to see if your memory's having problems.

 

Show us numbers on CrystalDiskMark to see if your drive is being slow.

 

Show us a score in a 3DMark Firestrike run so we can compare it to the score of similar graphics solutions (the physics score won't hurt to look at too).

 

And finally, show us a Cinebench score to see if the CPU's the one giving you trouble.

Which Linux benchmarks do you want to see? I'm running Arch Linux.

 

Here are some benchmarks I ran while I was testing a Radeon 390X card. Look for "Supermicro X10DAL 2x 2660-v3 Radeon 390X" to see my system. I'm running a GTX 970 now, but the performance is about the same for desktop applications.

 

Jmeter1 - 16 X Intel Xeon E5-2690 V3 @ 2.59GHz Benchmarks - OpenBenchmarking.org
http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1601276-HA-1601260HA52

Fiteyes Benchmarks, Linux Performance - OpenBenchmarking.org
http://openbenchmarking.org/s/fiteyes

FitEyes Testing Benchmarks - OpenBenchmarking.org
http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1601278-HA-1601275HA22

FitEyes Testing Benchmarks - OpenBenchmarking.org
http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1601277-HA-1601275HA66

Jmeter1 - 16 X Intel Xeon E5-2690 V3 @ 2.59GHz Benchmarks - OpenBenchmarking.org
http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1601276-HA-1601260HA52

Jmeter1 - 16 X Intel Xeon E5-2690 V3 @ 2.59GHz Benchmarks - OpenBenchmarking.org
http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1601276-HA-1601276HA91

 

[Energycore]

2 minutes ago, FitEyes said:

Which Linux benchmarks do you want to see? I'm running Arch Linux.

 

Here are some benchmarks I ran while I was testing a Radeon 390X card. Look for "Supermicro X10DAL 2x 2660-v3 Radeon 390X" to see my system. I'm running a GTX 970 now, but the performance is about the same for desktop applications.

 

Jmeter1 - 16 X Intel Xeon E5-2690 V3 @ 2.59GHz Benchmarks - OpenBenchmarking.org
http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1601276-HA-1601260HA52

Fiteyes Benchmarks, Linux Performance - OpenBenchmarking.org
http://openbenchmarking.org/s/fiteyes

FitEyes Testing Benchmarks - OpenBenchmarking.org
http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1601278-HA-1601275HA22

FitEyes Testing Benchmarks - OpenBenchmarking.org
http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1601277-HA-1601275HA66

Jmeter1 - 16 X Intel Xeon E5-2690 V3 @ 2.59GHz Benchmarks - OpenBenchmarking.org
http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1601276-HA-1601260HA52

Jmeter1 - 16 X Intel Xeon E5-2690 V3 @ 2.59GHz Benchmarks - OpenBenchmarking.org
http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1601276-HA-1601276HA91

 

Are you running a Virtual Machine? I'm not too familiar with VMs but perhaps there's an issue somewhere in its config. I'd need someone who knows their shit about VMs to take over for that though.

[JefferyD90]

36 minutes ago, FitEyes said:

It's ECC RAM. I would be getting ECC errors if the RAM was bad, right?

I PROMISE you that it is either memory, storage, or software related.  It could also be power delivery, but I'm assuming you did the math before you bought all your components, and I cant imagine it struggling with such little things and then not being able to turn on at all.

 

Anyways, if it is a software issue, I suggest that you install your OS and drivers correctly, then don't install any program that gets in the way of normal operations.

 

The fact that it is ECC memory means that while a normal system would just blue screen, your system will just keep on keepin' on until you fix it.

 

And if it is storage related a simple disk check is a good start into fixing your problem.

[FitEyes]

3 hours ago, Energycore said:

Fire up memtest86+ (it's a bootable application, download the iso then mount it and image it with the included tool into a USB drive) to see if your memory's having problems.

 

Show us numbers on CrystalDiskMark to see if your drive is being slow.

 

Show us a score in a 3DMark Firestrike run so we can compare it to the score of similar graphics solutions (the physics score won't hurt to look at too).

 

And finally, show us a Cinebench score to see if the CPU's the one giving you trouble.

I have WIndows 10 installed now (as a test). I will install some benchmarks. Which ones are free? (I won't be keeping Windows installed after these tests so it doesn't make sense to purchase software I'm not going to keep.)

 

It looks like 3DMark on Steam costs money ($59.95). I haven't checked the others yet...

[Little Bear]

6 hours ago, FitEyes said:

I have WIndows 10 installed now (as a test). I will install some benchmarks. Which ones are free? (I won't be keeping Windows installed after these tests so it doesn't make sense to purchase software I'm not going to keep.)

 

It looks like 3DMark on Steam costs money ($59.95). I haven't checked the others yet...

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/2716/futuremark-3dmark-2013-v2-0-2530

^3dmark free

[FitEyes]

9 hours ago, Little Bear said:

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/2716/futuremark-3dmark-2013-v2-0-2530

^3dmark free

My Fire Strike (v1.1) score was 10678 with a GTX 970. http://www.3dmark.com/fs/8858132

 

Apparently that is similar to a Core i5-4590 with 16 GB RAM and a Gigabyte Z97P motherboard. If I built this for gaming I'd be disappointed, obviously. But I didn't build it for gaming.

 

I guess that partly explains why this machine is slower than my i7... but the everyday desktop application performance is much slower than this score would indicate. And that holds true for other benchmarks I have run.

 

I'm going to run more benchmarks to see if I learn anything else.