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"Affinity, my dear Watson"

Crosstalk: Second Reality · published 26 days ago

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Dev log #9

Hey there.

Well, it turns out that I'm stupid or something.

One bug in my utility library, LDG, violently reduced performance, which wasn't clear until something pushed it, a little something such as Crosstalk's simulators. Apparently, nearly two years ago when I first started writing the library, I decided that individual programs would use singular thread pools. Well, in Crosstalk, I use four. Each thread in the pool gets an index, and that index decides the core affinity of that thread. The indices are not unique, so each pool is 0-indexed and starts from 0. So all four pools had threads that were railing the same logical cores. I couldn't figure it out until something really started pushing those threads. After fixing this (by not setting affinity manually in the util lib), the peak clock frequency went from about 51kHz to ~238kHz!

Anyway, this log is just that. I also shot a video:

*DanglingPtr

DOOM is a trademark of id Software LLC, a ZeniMax Media company. Crosstalk nor Ongakken are affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by id Software LLC, ZeniMax Media Inc., or Microsoft. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Screenshots are shown for capability demonstration purposes.

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