[Other]: high CPU usage

[randynov]

i'm on a macbook pro, 2.4GHz dual core with 4GB ram and when i rune tuneup, it is consistently using 70-80% of my CPU, even when i'm not cleaning anything (i.e. it's idle and no music is playing). over time, tuneup uses more CPU than most all of my other applications combined. is there a way this can be brought down or throttled some? there is a noticeable decrease in response time when tuneup is running, and i'm having to quit the application just to regain responsiveness.

any help would be greatly appreciated!

thanks,
randy

[stephen]

Hi Randy,

On first run, TuneUp parses your entire collection for missing cover art (for the Cover Art tab). Once this initial run through is complete, TuneUp should use less tan 5% of your CPU while idling. How big is your music collection? One thing you can try is leaving TuneUp on overnight to let it run through the collection. Once the initial run through is complete, the results are cached until you hit the "refresh" button on the Cover Art tab.

We've already modified TuneUp's "startup routine" on the PC and we're bringing synchronicity to the Mac with each update.

Please post back with the results of the "overnight run"

Thanks!

[randynov]

Stephen,

Thanks for getting back to me. I currently have ~30k songs in my library and have been "cleaning" them in batches of 30-50 at a time. With that, I've noticed some other odd behaviors, but I'll come back to those.

I currently have TuneUp running, but it is not cleaning any files. I've had it & itunes open for several hours now. I have had TuneUp running for days at a time with no changes. I just ran top and this is what I'm getting for current CPU usage:

Processes:  123 total, 3 running, 3 stuck, 117 sleeping... 601 threads                                                                        20:59:39
Load Avg:  1.55,  1.66,  1.56    CPU usage: 42.74% user, 20.94% sys, 36.32% idle
SharedLibs: num =    6, resident =   44M code, 4368K data, 3500K linkedit.
MemRegions: num = 33208, resident = 1617M +   31M private,  301M shared.
PhysMem:  640M wired, 2147M active, 1138M inactive, 3916M used,  180M free.
VM: 24G + 361M   621701(0) pageins, 395385(0) pageouts

  PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE  VSIZE
51344 TuneUp      21.3%  2:05:23   8   235   2410  152M-   27M-  195M   786M

I'm open to any suggestions you have or profiling you would like to do.

As for the other issues, please let me know if I should start a new thread:
- occasionally, when a song is in multiple albums (i.e. the original album, various collection albums, best of albums, soundtracks, etc.), TuneUp seems to take one of the collection albums rather than the original album (my personal preference). this is especially frustrating when trying to clean part of the original album and most of the songs are identified correctly but several are instead identified as part of a collection. clearing those songs and cleaning them again will sometimes show a different album.
- occasionally, even after choosing from one of the 4 options, a random album cover will be downloaded and put on the songs. usually this is another picture from one of the other songs i recently cleaned leading me to believe it might be a caching issue.
- while this is more of a feature request, i would really like the ability to choose between possible albums when it is not clear which a song belongs to. taking more clues from other songs being manually cleaned at that time might be a good way to prioritize.

thanks!
randy

[stephen]

Hey Randy,

No problem! First let's cover the "other" questions:

Originally Posted by randynov

- occasionally, when a song is in multiple albums (i.e. the original album, various collection albums, best of albums, soundtracks, etc.), TuneUp seems to take one of the collection albums rather than the original album (my personal preference). this is especially frustrating when trying to clean part of the original album and most of the songs are identified correctly but several are instead identified as part of a collection. clearing those songs and cleaning them again will sometimes show a different album.

This one's been discussed a bit: here's one example...here's another

We're working on how to best implement it and it's definitely on our roadmap.

Originally Posted by randynov

- occasionally, even after choosing from one of the 4 options, a random album cover will be downloaded and put on the songs. usually this is another picture from one of the other songs i recently cleaned leading me to believe it might be a caching issue.

Hrm, I've never run into this one myself, but you're saying that TuneUp will write a cover art that was previously used to a new file that doesn't even have the cover as an option? I'll look into this one...

Originally Posted by randynov

- while this is more of a feature request, i would really like the ability to choose between possible albums when it is not clear which a song belongs to. taking more clues from other songs being manually cleaned at that time might be a good way to prioritize.

I think this is similar to the first request...we're working to improve how we group artists / tracks / albums.

[stephen]

In regards to the CPU usage, I just launched TuneUp and I was around 25-30% during the launch.

Once TuneUp was loaded (and idle)

13108 TuneUp      13.4%  1:44.93   8   116    592   25M    14M    45M   281M
12859 iTunes       0.1%  1:07.37  21   363+   677   26M    40M    53M   359M

We're always working at improving performance. That said, TuneUp doesn't lock up my machine when idling (I'm on a MacBook Pro 2.2Ghz with 2GB of RAM) TuneUp will, however, jump up in processing once you start cleaning as it generates each audio fingerprint for analysis. The lookup process is processor intensive and there isn't any way to bring down the CPU usage there (yet).

Is TuneUp locking up your machine when idling? Or when processing? Both? TuneUp actually shouldn't ever lock up your machine (even while cleaning). Your machine will probably run slower while cleaning (much like encoding video) but you shouldn't ever be forced to hard reboot.

[randynov]

Stephen,

Thanks for the threads on the multiple albums issue, I look forward to the continued development!

My machine never locks up when TuneUp is idling, but it does hover around 20% CPU usage, even when it's doing nothing. I understand and expect the jump when cleaning (with the glimmerblocker, I've even been impressed with the variety of websites you guys check for album art). It's not a show-stopping issue, but I am concerned that it's taking so much processor when idling.

Not sure how important this is, but I'm on 10.5.6.

Thanks!
Randy

[stephen]

Hi Randy,

I just spoke to one of our mac developers and he said that the CPU idling usage is a known issue that he's actually currently working on. For now, CPU usage at around 15-25% is normal for TuneUp depending on the size of the collection when idling.

Future versions will bring this idle usage down, but the primary focus on mac is making sure that all the features that are currently implemented on the PC are implemented on the Mac ASAP.

[yestertech]

TuneUp now sits at 40% of a core, and did not do that last version