How to get the highest CPU performance in Maverick

Kamikaze2000 wrote:

This means that logging out and logging in back, changes the priorities in such a way that I cannot increase the priorities back to their initial values using the renice command.

That actually sounds about right, logging out has killed the processes under normal usage with this system...unlike some versions of Unix where you can log out and let the processes continue...this is not an engineering workstation so cannot do that...and once restarted, there is not a prior nice reset to use as the reference point for renice to change. Not sure if that logic pattern makes sense to another person 🙂

I do think we are back to the original discussion that started all of this...for an MBP there is just so much you can do because of the number of cores available. I have not used MATLAB in several years so do not know how well it has been multi-threaded to take advantage of a lot of available cores. So, my reaction at this point is that you have run up against the limits of the hardware to supply enough processors, aka cores, for the kind of load you are trying to put on the system.

It would be interesting as an experiment to see how this would perform on a Mac Pro with 8 or 12 cores.

No need for apologies, just a nuance in the activities...I do think this original topic, "highest CPU performance in Maverick" is pushing the limits of he way Mavericks is setup for the average user, plus the limits of the MBP for the way you want it to work. True, Mac OS X is a multi-user system, but you are trying to not only operate multi-user but with a very compute-intensive software suite. So the system is being asked to load up the processor very heavily, and then leave that running in the background while bringing in another user which is now placing demands on that same processor resource.

A better fit for that kind of multi-user login with processes running for each would probably be handled better by a machine running the Mac OS X Server version of the operating system...that OS is designed to share resources between multiple simultaneous users sharing the same resources. The Mac Pro with the more powerful Xeon E5 processor and system design for multi-threading would, in my view, be a better solution if you need to do this kind of work on a regular basis.

The Xeon processor in the Mac Pro has a much, much higher Thermal Design Power than the i5 and i7 processors of the consumer-grade equipment...meaning the processor can run at full clock speed for a much longer time before running into temperature limits reducing the clock speed, as well as having significantly more on-board cache memory to speed things along.

You have not said if you do this kind of processing on a regular basis, but those are my thoughts on this issue if that is what you are doing. The MBP is great, I run FORTRAN code on mine regularly, but do not attempt to do anything at all while the code is running. Luckily the code runs very fast so I am not inconvenienced by it. For big problems I use my iMac which has even more memory and faster i7 processor so the work gets done with less impact.

Just some thoughts on this discussion...this has been very interesting and getting back to the heart of computing so thanks for the challenging discussion.

Yes, the screen lock is a process itself...every thing has to get its share of the resources 🙂