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Debian 10. I am trying to render with blender in the background, like so:

nice -n 19 blender -b --python my_script.py

This renders to a file using the GPU. When rendering, I can see GPU usage spike to 100% with nvidia-smi, the system load goes up to around 3, and with top I can see cpu usage go to 110% for both blender and xorg. iostat shows almost zero iowait.

At this point, my system becomes almost completely unresponsive. Windows take 10 seconds or so to get focus, etc. If I do ctrl+z, after 10 seconds or so the signal is processed and as soon as blender is suspended, my system instantly returns to normal.

My end goal is to render in the background on my workstation while keeping my system responsive. How do I accomplish this?

cat pants
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  • Your system might be thrashing. What does `free -g` say (while the system is sluggish)? – Hermann Mar 01 '23 at 01:25
  • 12 gigs available, and iowait is super low. If the system was thrashing I would expect iowait to be quite high, wouldn't I? – cat pants Mar 01 '23 at 01:44
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    This is a "perk" of using NVIDIA under Xorg. You may want to give Wayland a try or just go back to Windows. – Artem S. Tashkinov Mar 01 '23 at 07:17
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    Try `cpulimit` which uses sigstop/sigcont to give a process small amounts of cpu. Obviously, a small amount of cpu might still queue up a large amount of gpu work, but it is worth trying. – meuh Mar 01 '23 at 08:26
  • Looks like firefox was part of the issue. I closed some tabs, restarted and updated firefox, and the system is much more responsive when rendering. – cat pants Mar 02 '23 at 23:21

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