Cannot use PC while crypto-mining on Ubuntu: works great on windows though

Question

I have an RTX 2080, and I can mine Ethereum with 37-40 MH/s on windows 10, while using the PC for mundane tasks, browsing, even able to play video games too (in this case, the hashrate drops to 10MH/s but still works) and my PC runs smoothly.

I have an Ubuntu Linux 20.04. on my PC as well on a different partition on which I work for the most part of the day. No matter what mining software I use, mining will make the system lag so much I can barely interact with anything. 5-10 seconds of lags, even struggle to stop the mining command line.

My drivers are ok, I can see on the resource monitor that sometimes CPU cores jump to 100% (but not all the time) and my nvidia-smi --loop=1 outputs normal values. Any idea what can be the cause of this?

Thanks in advance.

CPU Usage while mining:

nvidia-smi --loop=1 output timestamp:

Wed Feb 24 14:55:30 2021        
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 460.39       Driver Version: 460.39       CUDA Version: 11.2     | 
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+ 
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC | 
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. | 
|                               |                      |               MIG M. |
|===============================+======================+======================| 
|   0  GeForce RTX 2080    Off  | 00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A | 
| 47%   61C    P0   166W / 245W |   5243MiB /  7959MiB |    100%      Default | 
|                               |                      |                  N/A | 
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ 
| Processes:                                                                  | 
|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                  GPU Memory | 
|        ID   ID                                                   Usage      | 
|=============================================================================| 
|    0   N/A  N/A      1267      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                120MiB | 
|    0   N/A  N/A      2419      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                510MiB | 
|    0   N/A  N/A      2556      G   /usr/bin/gnome-shell              101MiB | 
|    0   N/A  N/A      2755      G   livewallpaper                      55MiB | 
|    0   N/A  N/A      3029      G   ...AAAAAAAA== --shared-files       42MiB | 
|    0   N/A  N/A     20326      G   gnome-control-center                2MiB | 
|    0   N/A  N/A     20561      C   ./bminer                         4377MiB | 
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ 
Wed Feb 24 14:55:31 2021         
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ 
| NVIDIA-SMI 460.39       Driver Version: 460.39       CUDA Version: 11.2     | 
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+ 
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC | 
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. | 
|                               |                      |               MIG M. | 
|===============================+======================+======================| 
|   0  GeForce RTX 2080    Off  | 00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A | 
| 47%   61C    P0   163W / 245W |   5243MiB /  7959MiB |    100%      Default | 
|                               |                      |                  N/A | 
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

you might want to play around with your scheduler and/or niceness. I can imagine it will help if you set the nicessof your mining processes lower than the process that your normal user level spawns — Robert Riedl, Mar 08 '21 at 12:18

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 05 '21 at 16:50

0

Ideally, you would move your mining to another system. I believe the reason it still works on windows is that windows gives itself more overhead as an OS, that way it can still run "smoothly" while under load. I assume that ubuntu takes less space. If I am right, maybe the hashrate increases when on ubuntu as it has access to more resources. a solution I can think of would be to move the mining to a virtual machine, that way, you could run an optimized OS if you want, plus you could control the amount of resources mining is allowed to use, with some configuration, you would be able to use your ubuntu system at the same time as you mine, tho the hashrate may drop a bit. I hope I was helpfull :) (it's my first answer ever)

answered Mar 05 '21 at 16:50

Tredecillion

1

thank you for your answer! Sadly, I am really required to work on Ubuntu, so changing the base of my problem is out of scope here. Interestingly, my Hashrate is a bit slower on Ubuntu, maybe the drivers are less optimized? – ForestG Mar 08 '21 at 17:32
I will give a try putting this in a VM or Docker tomorrow tho. Thanks for the idea! – ForestG Mar 08 '21 at 17:33
I can't help but to wonder why you are stuck on Ubuntu for mining, there are plenty of optimized distros out there, maybe combine that with the VM idk. I do wonder why that hashrate is slower on ubuntu tho, could be drivers, is the algorithm the same? if so, chances are it is the drivers, are you using the open-source ones that come with Ubuntu or did you install the proprietary one? – Tredecillion Mar 09 '21 at 22:58

Cannot use PC while crypto-mining on Ubuntu: works great on windows though

1 Answers1