When you are using SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing) you might want to override the kernel's process scheduling and bind a certain process to a specific CPU(s).
But what is CPU affinity?
CPU affinity is nothing but a scheduler property that "bonds" a process to a given set of CPUs on the SMP system. The Linux scheduler will honor the given CPU affinity and the process will not run on any other CPUs. Note that the Linux scheduler also supports natural CPU affinity:
The scheduler attempts to keep processes on the same CPU as long as practical for performance reasons. Therefore, forcing a specific CPU affinity is useful only in certain applications. For example, application such as Oracle (ERP apps) use # of cpus per instance licensed. You can bound Oracle to specific CPU to avoid license problem. This is a really useful on large server having 4 or 8 CPUS
Setting processor affinity for a certain task or process using taskset command
taskset is used to set or retrieve the CPU affinity of a running process given its PID or to launch a new COMMAND with a given CPU affinity. However taskset is not installed by default. You need to install schedutils (Linux scheduler utilities) package.
Install schedutils
Debian Linux:
# apt-get install schedutils
Red Hat Enterprise Linux:
# up2date schedutils
OR
# rpm -ivh schedutils*
Under latest version of Debian / Ubuntu Linux taskset is installed by default using util-linux package.
The CPU affinity is represented as a bitmask, with the lowest order bit corresponding to the first logical CPU and the highest order bit corresponding to the last logical CPU. For example:
- 0x00000001 is processor #0 (1st processor)
- 0x00000003 is processors #0 and #1
- 0x00000004 is processors #2 (3rd processor)
To set the processor affinity of process 13545 to processor #0 (1st processor) type following command:
# taskset 0x00000001 -p 13545
If you find a bitmask hard to use, then you can specify a numerical list of processors instead of a bitmask using -c flag:
# taskset -c 1 -p 13545
# taskset -c 3,4 -p 13545
Where,
- -p : Operate on an existing PID and not launch a new task (default is to launch a new task)
See also:
- How do I find out Linux CPU utilization?
- Linux Limiting or restricting SMP CPU activation in SMP mode
- Read man page of sched_setscheduler(2) and taskset(1) for more information.
UPDATED for accuracy.
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{ 28 comments… read them below or add one }
How can I check if it is is using only 1 cpu?
Use any one of the following commands:
less /proc/interruptsorcd /sys/devices/system/cpuorls
mpstatSee url
it should be
taskset -c -p 1 13545
options firts, arguments later. I know, it seems stupid but it is what it is. It only worked like this on my machines (debian)
Hiya, thanks for this very interesting subject. I was looking for something like this, to be able to schedule my VMware Workstation 6.0 to run on my HP xw9400 Workstation Dual-Core Opteron (3&4) under RHEL5 (x86-64).
Suppose I give this command
root@dialer243:~#taskset -c -p 1 13545
how do I check that the command worked or not!! I mean the cpu affinity was set or not ?
Ramanath:
You can use the ‘top’ command.
After loading ‘top’ press 1 (one) to switch to SMP view, which will show each CPU usage.
Try assigning CPU intensive program to one of your CPU, and see (in ‘top’) whether the affinity is set or not.
In my system, the program taskset definitely do it’s job. If I don’t use the taskset, the CPU that work on my program is vary from 1 to 4 (I have quad core), when I assign the program to one specific CPU, then only that CPU that has high usage.
A little odd, but installing schedutils on ubuntu gutsy would remove essential components which is not recommended. However, taskset is available as part of default install.
Yeah, taskset is from util-linux. The syntax is now taskset -cp $CPU $PID
Took me a few minutes to figure that one out :) It wants to remove util-linux for schedutils and that has valuable utilities in it. It has taskset anyway. This article might be good to update…
Ubuntu 7.10 gutsy x86_64.
this is great – i have a java wrapper on a engine written in C++ that crashes whenever the engine is run on more than 1 processor. since all the newer processors are multi-core, i have been running the OS in uniprocessor mode and basically wasting the other cores!
~Ellis http://www.lightspoke.com
Does the taskset do its job on already running processes. I tried but it didn’t work. First I ran 2 identical processes without taskset. They were homogeneously running on all 8 cpus I had. Now, when I tried assigning 2 cpus to 1 and 6 to another, it didn’t work.
I killed the process where I assigned 6 cpus. Still the other was using all 8 cpus.
hi guys,
I tried using taskset and schedtool interchangeably, and I noticed that when I’m running virtualbox, which is a cpu intensive process, then I change proc affinity which doesn’t seem to have that big an effect in ‘top’. I change from one proc to another and the output of ‘top’ seems unchanged, while the process is already running. However, if I begin a new cpu intensive process and assign it an affinity before running it, then I can see changes in the output of ‘top’. any clues to this? perhaps my already running virtualbox is too ‘attached’ to its original proc that the linux kernel decides to override/not pay attention to my schedtool/taskset commands?
Hi,
Could you tell how you change proc affinity, I have found a long time.
Thank you.
anu@el[~]$ taskset -c -p 1 11574
pid 11574′s current affinity list: 0,1
pid 11574′s new affinity list: 1
it works to me
debian etch
great tool to look what proceses are running is
htop
Actually, it evidently works especially when I set a process’ affinity before running the process. I noticed that while running a cpu or memory intensive task such as Virtual box or VMware, alternating/changing processor affinity doesn’t seem as evident as my previous example. Anyone noticed this? Perhaps it has something to do with the Linux kernel overriding the manual affinity changing since the kernel knows how to better handle processes and it probably knows that there will be performance hits when moving processes such as VMware/Virtualbox from one proc to another (e.g. cache hit rate etc) ?
Hi,
How to use task set before the process started?
Example: when I start oracle db, I want to use only 2 CPU2 for oracle DB processes. In this point I do not know what is PID.
Oracle says, if you use 4 CPUs at ANY point of time, you should pay oracle license for 4 CPUs.
Please help me … I do not want to setup kernel maxcpus parameter because I will loose CPUs …I want to use them for some other processes.
Regards,
Angelina
Angelina,
Try following for 2 cpu
taskset -c 0,1 /etc/init.d/oracle-xe startOR
su - oracletaskset -c 0,1 lsnrctl start
taskset -c 0,1 dbstart
OR
taskset -c 0,1 sqlplus '/ as sysdba'And at SQL prompt type:
startupHTH
This is very cool!
One question though: Once you bind a process to certain processors, are those processors dedicated for this process alone? Do other processes use these processors?
Ramanath
when you run the command
ankit@hover2:~$ taskset -c -p 0 6369
pid 6369′s current affinity list: 0,1
pid 6369′s new affinity list: 0
0 & 1 is the two cores of my dual core CPU which I changed the affinity to core 0. The above mesg. clearly shows the the affinity was changed to core 0 from core 0,1.
A great article. Keep it up.
Ankit Singh
How you can unbind a process from the selected processor affinity?
I mean, if you don’t want keep the affinity on a process all time, how can you unbind the established affinity between the processor and the process?
Something like:
taskset -c -p Idprocess?
or
taskset -c * -p Idprocess?
or
taskset -c 0,1,2,3 -p Idprocess?
What are the key guts needed to make this work? I want to put this into a busybox-based embedded system… where apt-get won’t help me at all. I need to statically get it compiled onto the never-changing initrd…
Nixcraft,
This was a very helpful post. It solved part of my problems. But I still have another problem:
How do I know in each processor a current process is running into.
For instance I have a quadcore machine and want to know if the process with pid 999 is running in the cpu 0, 1, 2 or 3.
top command shows only the processor average utilization by this pid but don’t show each cpu is this.
Taskset let me bound a task to a CPU, but yet i don’t know each cpu this process was previously running into.
thanks
Just found the solution
ps -eo psr,pid
this gives the processor in each the pid is current assigned to.
kool stuff – it helped me a lot .thankx in advance
i am in need of running a application wit the same cofnfig file , but in different processor .
even though i run both pairs in different proccessor (as per ur taskset commands) . both are crashin in the sense if i change something in 1 pair it gets reflected in other..can t they be prevented.
pls help me throu
I hava a proccess with forks, child process will have the same affinity ??.
Thanks :D
how asign a processor to specific user ?
many thanks.
taskset -p option pid
option 1 means 1st processor
option 2 means 2nd processor
option 0xffffffff means all the processor
Thanks nixcraft!
Very useful!
Congrats!
I hawe quad core cpu, and if i want to all linux processes use only 2 cores? What is the right syntax?
Now i have in /etc/init.d/rcS:
this sett all proccess to first core, but now i want alocate 2 cores for all proccess