Disable Core Parking!

So, I don't know where to post this, but I thought it would be relevant to all streamers and the OBS community is growing so I thought I'd throw this in here.

I learned about disabling core parking earlier today as a way to reduce microstuttering and after doing it, it has increased my system responsiveness by I would say 400%. I have a i5-3570k and I've also tried this on my laptop, which is a older Core2 T8300. This affects anything with more then two cores, which is pretty much all modern processors. I'm unsure of how Windows 8 deals with this and/or if it would show benefits on W8, but in Windows 7 it makes a huge difference.

Core parking is a feature that saves power by turning off cores with low workloads... This can happen for a few micro-seconds and may even happen when the core is under load. For instance my main computer never showed up as 'parked' in resource monitor, but after doing this I noticed a huge improvement in responsiveness and system latency. It's the easiest to feel with my mouse and when typing. Basically both inputs showed huge improvements in resposivness.

It also has quantifiable results in some applications. Basically anything that is sensitive to latency, such as encoding, gaming, and audio work shows improvements.

I personally haven't tried gaming or streaming yet, so take this with a grain of salt. It also has a downside as it increases power usage. I personally have not seen a increase in power usage while monitoring with Argus Monitor and all my C-States still work (CPU clocks down and uses less power when not under load). The benefits are tremendous though.

If you use a AMD Bulldozer or Vishera, this improves system responsivness and performance!

http://bitsum.com/about_cpu_core_parking.php (It's called Parkcontrol partway down the page)

Most of the fixes use registry keys, but that's an actual program to disable it. It also allows you to modify the setting for battery profile as well (in case you use a laptop and aren't plugged in). I personally have not seen a downside to it yet (fingers crossed) and of course, use at your own risk. If your system catches fire I had nothing to do with it.

Let me know what sort of results you guys get. You don't need to reboot after using it either.

When I reinstalled my laptop (Lenovo IdeaPad Z580 with i7) from W7 to W8 i couldn't even stream because of Windows Aero but this super software called OBS does the magic for me. Also when i was reading stuff here on forum I saw this thread and i was like what is that? . After i readed this i figured out that this may solve my another problem . And it solved, i was not able to watch Youtube for one hour even if i had power saving power scheme activated my battery just discharged very fast. I've readed some stuff about this Core Parking and enabled it on some power schemes and now i can be on internet and do basic stuff on my laptop for 4-6 hours with 60% charged battery (i have "optimal battery life" checked on Power Management from Lenovo).

But there was one problem with "Power Saving" scheme, i couldn't change CoreParking in that software what you linked. I was able to do it with workaround:

Registry File:

Code:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00\0cc5b647-c1df-4637-891a-dec35c318583]
"Attributes"=dword:00000000

Default value of the variable Attributes is 1 which means that the OS won't show the Core Parking settings in Advanced Power Options. Setting it to zero (or deleting it completely) will enable the possibility of modifying the settings in Advanced Power Options

Click to expand...

Taken from : http://diit.cz/clanek/analyzing-cor...8-in-relation-to-amd-bulldozer-performance-in
This can also help some people.

Many thanks to you Bensam123 for this thread and Jim for awesome streaming software.

Merry christmas everyone!

P.S. Sorry for my english i'm 17 years old and i'm still learning it.

The utility I linked should have the option for different power profiles, and plugged and battery states. So it's possible to keep core parking enabled if your laptop is unplugged (if you so choose).

Disabling core parking increases responsiveness and fludity of almost all systems that do it. I have streamed with it disabled now and it doesn't even feel like OBS is operating in the background.

This may seem off topic, but core parking most definitely applies to multithreaded workloads in which OBS is part of.

Core parking doesn't really apply to streaming as once a load is applied the cores unpark. It only really helps for very transient / spikey loads.

Core parking operates on the millisecond level. It's also very aggressive as per the article. It's possible to have cores being parked for a split second (literally) when you're at 50% load or even more.

Try it, then judge. I assure you if you notice latency at all you'll notice a huge difference merely by trying it. This elevates practically all hitching when streaming.

We have a decent sized thread going on it at TR with about 20+ people so far listing positive results from all sorts of different usage scenarios: http://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=85357

Personally for me I use a really high DPI mouse, 8200, and could instantly tell as soon as it's off. Typing is a completely different experience as well.

http://www.coderbag.com/Programming-C/D ... ng-Utility

Windows 8 users should use this little program to check that status of Core Parking.

That specific utility changes different registry values then the utiltiy I linked in the OP. So if you use the one in the OP, it wont show up as doing anything in the coderbag utility, even though it does. The registry values that are changed are just in different locations. The one in the OP allows for on and off battery profiles and adds the option to enable the visibility setting in the power control panel.

Ok, so I know this is a super old thread, but I wanted to comment. I started streaming on Twitch last year, and purchased a new rig and everything just to do so. I've been banging my head against a wall trying to figure out why I would be having these massive lags, high CPU warning's in OBS and my PC hanging, and even freezing almost every single time I streamed. I even quit for 6 months because I couldn't figure out what the heck was the problem. Sent my PC back to cyber power 2x, they said nope everything is in working order.

Long story short, I started streaming again very recently and running into the same exact problems and found this little suggestion on Tom's Hardware, and gave it a try and WOW, the improvement is drastic. I didn't have a single freeze last night during my stream, the game was playable for once! I actually enjoyed myself. Microsoft even made a hotfix for this very issue, I guess Windows 7 has difficulty with AMD's processors, and they designed a hotfix, well 2 actually, the 2nd one to unpark your cores. Anyhow...

I have the AMD FX-4350 Quad-Core Processor, 4200 Mhz and when I was looking at my resource monitor noticed that 3 of my cores were parked most of the time when I was streaming. Since unparking, my CPU temps have come down too! So so so happy about this. So happy it was such a simple fix, before I started trying to replace hardware.

Also I run Windows 7. So, if you're banging your head like I was, give this a try it just might be the answer!


Processor - AMD FX-4350 Quad-Core Processor, 4200 Mhz

Video Card - AMD Radeon R9 200 Series

Motherboard - Gigabyte 970A-DS3P

OS - Windows 7

RAM - ADATA XPG V2 4 GB DDR3 1866 MHZ

Just a comment from me:
i use a AMD FX-8370E overclocked to ~4.7ghz ... and unparking cores in windows 8/8.1 is super easy-
in control panel go to power options and in the power plan's advanced settings setup minimum cpu state to 100% and you're done.
it has a very tiny effect on streaming with obs with this cpu but i can confirm it actually is there!
when the stream is on small load sometimes i would see only 6cores/threads operating under stream...
with parking disabled i see an almost perfectly-equal load across all cores/threads at any time!

Just a FYI, setting power plan to 'performance' or your CPU state to 100% will not unpark your cores. That's a different feature and will basically disable Speedstep for your processor (it'll use a decent amount more power).

You can find a easy to use utility at this site: https://bitsum.com/parkcontrol/

Coreparking happens on a MS level, which is part of what causes the stuttering. You can't completely remove it even if your processor is running at 100% as it's a software 'feature' and not a 'hardware' one, such as frequency scaling (speedstep).

well as a overclocker i have all the power saving features disabled in bios - as far as i can tell from the behaviour of the core usage it does disable core parking - you can see the parked cores in resource manager...