Multiplicity prevents Ryzen 3xxx (Zen 2) cores from sleep

Hello,
I have forwarded your questions/problems to the Stardock Support team for their assistance. Please keep an eye on this thread for any updates. We appreciate you feedback and patience.

Thank You,
Basj
Stardock Community Assistant.

Hello,

No way yet but there has been some discussion about how frequently MP polls for other reasons - this could be added to that conversation. 

Thanks for the report.

Sean Drohan
Stardock Support Manager

This is happening also with i7 9700K and causes it to run several degrees hotter at idle than necessary because all cores continuously run at full speed. 

I would love a fix for this!

You can mitigate this issue by setting the affinity of "MP2Control.exe" and "Multipl2.exe" to a single CPU core.  In this way, only that core is stuck at maximum speed.  The rest will behave as normal.

This is a real pain to do every time Multiplicity launches.  Anybody know a way to make this setting permanent?

I use a (paid) tool named "Process Lasso" to permanently set process affinities, energy profiles, ...

So far I only used it for games to set affinities to even cores in order to avoid slow-downs caused by hyper-threading.

It's a good idea to use it for Multilicity too.

That is a good suggestion if you are using Process Lasso anyway. 

But, to pay for a second app to wrangle a poorly behaving paid (and relatively expensive) app into "mostly" behaving is rather unsatisfying.  Much better to simply request a refund and pay once for something that works and behaves well.

or you could give us a chance to investigate further and see if there is an easy fix our end.

Certainly happy to do that!

Do you have any further information on this as a test on an intel i9-9900k is showing it down clocking to 1gz (and bouncing around there) as expected with MP connected via seamless and KVM mode.

Is there a particular thing which triggers the issue?  For example is everything fine whilst the mouse is on the primary, or only when on the secondary?

It happens only on the server side.  Both client and server are i7 9700K (which does not have hyperthreading while your i9-9900k does...  might be a factor) with Logitech mouse and Corsair keyboard.  G Hub and iCUE are both installed and I tried turning both down to minimum polling with no effect. I also tried closing both of those completely with no effect.

There is no trigger and it behaves this way from startup to shutdown.  I have only tested seamless mode, not KVM.

I compared my Ryzen 3900X CPU usage with and without Multiplicity running while my secondary PC was off in both cases (which it is 99.9% of the time).

For the Ryzen 3 / Zen2 series, the only tool that accurately show cpu usage is Ryzen Master. All other tools will cause CPU cores to wake up from sleep as they measure activity ("observer effect").

I have been investigating further and cannot get a i9-9900k to show anything remotely similar.

All cpu cores are happily dropping to 800Mhz when nothing is going on.  There are occasional spikes to upto 4.7Ghz across all cpu cores, but that happens with or without MP running when moving the mouse between apps (as each app no doubt processes mouse move messages)

This was using OpenHardwareMonitor.

What does that tool show for you?

I will say that gaming mice tend to send an absurd number of mouse move messages which will inherently use way more cpu (and network bandwidth), but this would only be when actually controlling another computer.

Ryzen processors may be different as they are sensitive in different ways, but an Intel i7 and i9 using the same socket and generation of cpu core should respond the same so that implies there is another factor here as well.  Either a monitoring tool difference between us or some other bit of software also involved.

If you do not move your mouse at all, what cpu behaviour are you seeing?

Also are you using audio sharing?  When that is connected the OS periodic timers will be running at a higher rate.  This is needed because audio sharing runs very small buffers so response time is critical.

I'm using CPU-Z and RealTempGT. When I start the multiplicity processes listed above, it happens.  When I stop them, it stops.  Regardless of anything else.  This happens on two different PCs (identical hardware) whenever they are the server, even if there are no connected clients.

I've tried disabling audio sharing and no impact.  Same for holding the mouse still, reducing report rate on both mouse and kbd to 125Hz, and closing the Corsair and Logitech apps.  No impact.

At this point, I do appreciate your efforts but I think it's time for me to move on.  I will still check back here and assist where possible, but I've switched to a different tool that works perfectly so if you could go ahead and process my refund request I would be most appreciative.

As a last suggestion, perhaps you can disable hyperthreading on your CPU and see if you can reproduce.  If not, we can just chalk this up to a random conflict between MP and some obscure piece of software that is running on my PCs.  I suspect that if it were widespread you'd know about it by now.

Thanks again!

For any refund, a ticket needs to be placed:

https://esupport.stardock.com/index.php?/Tickets/Submit

Sean Drohan
Stardock Support Manager

I have already submitted a request via email.  Is that not sufficient?

If you did not get a notification that a ticket was created, from whatever email address you sent anything to, no. 

Sean Drohan
Stardock Support Manager

seeing this on three systems 2700x 3900x and a 2950x 

We have an update to Multiplicity in testing which may help this.  We think the issue was the OS scheduling a timer which was running on new threads each time so we have swapped to our own thread in the hopes this gets scheduled in a more sane manner.