GNS3 Kills my system
I have been a user of Dynamips/GNS3 for several years now and I canít imagine what I would do without it. I use it for doing Proof Of Concept work and for Studying. Recently I have been throwing more and more Labs together to help me study Service Provider topics. I was getting frustrated when firing up six or seven routers and my system coming to a standstill, worse still spending ages configuring idle PC values.
The PC I am using is a HP ML110 Xeon Dual Core 4GB of memory running Windows 7 x64, so its no slouch!
Process Lasso
I remember a few year back I got a process scheduling freebie from a HP partner which did a great job of keeping Dynamips in check, so I did some searching but could not find that product, plus it costs money, but during my searching I stumbled upon Process Lasso.(http://www.bitsum.com/prolasso.php). I have configured Process Lasso as following on my GNS3 system. (I still use the free version as it meets my GNS3 needs)
Options – >Configure Default Priorities ñ> setup dynamips-wxp.exe as below normal
This ensures my system only runs at 95% CPU usage and the system is OK for mouse and keyboard input. When I am running GNS3 I tend to dedicate the system to this and I would not be running anything else like email or other surplus programs.
Finally
If you use GNS3 then I recommend trying Process Lasso to help keep you system responsive. As my labs grow bigger I will personally get a better feel for how Process Lasso performs, hopefully not to the detriment of Dynamips. Good luck with your GNS3 labs.
Nice find! Thanks for sharing.
Six or Seven Routers are noch so much. What kind of router did you chose 7200? On janaury i bought a intel ssd 80gb. It¥s a new world of speed to use it with gns3.
I am running 2961s at the moment since the do all I need. I will move up to the 7200 if the Labs need it.
Whenever I have run GNS3 in the past whether it is 1 router or many the way it is coded (with out proper idle pc values) it would cause the system to be unresponsive and stick the processor(s) at 100%, so far using this process lasso I have not run into that problem.
I would love and SSD drive for my laptop as I have heard fantastic things about the performance.
Regards
John
Have you tried recalculating IDLE PC timers?
Yes, when building a fix lab for long term use I make sure I adjust idlepc. But even doing that can still cause 100% CPU usage, so process lasso help me trim that a bit and keep the system responsive.
regards
John
I need the release of the IOS for students and research, therefore I intend to live deeply and to breathe the world in Cisco and intend to improve the world of the communication.
I’m quite surprised you’d be happy witting with 95% CPU usage.
I’ve got over 18 routers running in my MPLS/MP-BGP setup on my dynamips box at home. It’s got a very cheap (£75 at the time) quad cpu and an el cheapo 4GB DDR2 kit. Once I got my idlepc set up correctly, the CPU never EVER goes above 40% – I could probably get away with even less RAM as well, 4GB was overkill.
When doing the idlepc’s at first I ensured I had tons of config on all the routers – OSPF, EIGRP, RIPv2, BGP, MPLS and so on. Maybe that made the initial difference?
Thank’s for hint. Helps a lot