March 17, 201610 yr Hey guys, recently my dad and I decided to build a double-headed gaming rig based on the one built by LinusTechTips. It is currently running two Windows 10 VM's on top of UnRaid 6.1.9 The specs are: Intel Core i7-5930K @ 3.50GHz 3.50GHz 32GB total RAM, 12.5GB per VM 2X Intel 530 Series 480GB SSD (These are our Cache Devices) 2X WD Red 3TB NAS HDD (These are our Array Devices) VM1: Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti Cores 0-4 pinned to this machine VM2: Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 Cores 6-10 pinned to this machine Cores 5 and 11 are left for UnRaid to use. So now on to the issue. When we attempt to run both machines at the same time, they run fine. But as soon as my brother starts playing or downloading/updating a game on VM2 while I try to watch a YouTube video on VM1, both machines stutter and slow down. Same thing happens in reverse. As another example, last night I was playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution on VM1 and after getting through the first mission (and this happens A LOT), the machine began to lag, and any audio that was produced sounded as if it was in slow motion. This is the first time we've attempted anything like this, so of course there are going to be bugs. If I have left out any information, let me know.
March 17, 201610 yr Community Expert My guess is that you have not properly managed to isolate the cores used by the two VMs from each other. That processor is a 6-core processor with hyper-threading support (i.e 2 threads per core). Normally with Intel processors the two threads on a physical core are paired up so that they appear as logical CPUs 0,6 1,7 2,8 etc. My suggestion would be to try giving 0,6 to unRAID and then try 1,7,2,8 on one VM and 3,9,4,10 on the other. That would leave 5,11 unused - you can put that wherever you think it is most likely to be of use. Do not forget that you must also not starve unRAID itself of processor time as it is needed for running the KVM sub-system. There is a script available that you can run to try and identify how your cores are paired up but its output is a bit cryptic from what I have seen so I suggest try some simple experiments with allocating cores and see if it helps. It might be worth starting with not all cores allocated initially to see how that works and then if things look good start adding cores to the VMs to see how things change.
March 17, 201610 yr Author My suggestion would be to try giving 0,6 to unRAID and then try 1,7,2,8 on one VM and 3,9,4,10 on the other. I will try this and get back to you with details on performance change.
March 17, 201610 yr Author No such luck. I switched the cores around like you said, and tried out Deus Ex. I got five minutes into the game and it did the same thing.
March 17, 201610 yr Community Expert No such luck. I switched the cores around like you said, and tried out Deus Ex. I got five minutes into the game and it did the same thing. No idea then I am afraid. I do not have the sort of setup you have so cannot speak from practical experience of what works. Maybe someone else will have some ideas
March 20, 201610 yr Try disable hyper threading in Bios. There is another post on this forum talking about the same thing. Lime tech need to look into the cpu pinning and interference with hyper threads and real cores.
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