Hi everyone,
I am very new to Clear linux - and not very experienced with linux in general - and I have an EPYC-based machine for which I want to optimize the performances as much as possible for all matters of monetizing its processing power.
This week, I managed to install and make the Clear linux live server version 43470 to work and make xmrig run on it. Unfortunately, the performance improvement I got from switching OSes for this one was minuscule (<0.5% relative to Linux Mint). This doesn’t surprise me as an OS’s cost on a machine’s performance goes only so far so if that overhead is already small then of course the optimizations in reducing this overhead will also be small. However, because I was recommended Clear Linux by a colleague specifically for my new machine with implications of a significant performance improvement, part of me wants to find out if I am just mistaken and there is much to gain through Clear Linux.
So my main question is is Clear Linux more properly suited for very low-end devices for which the OS has to run efficiently or is there good gains to be made on very powerful machines as well ? Is there some substantial benefits I can get from using Clear Linux instead of another distro and I’m just using it wrong ? Or is this just not a use case for which Clear Linux was intended ?
Additionally, while I was able to solve most problems, there is a few nitpicks left to be resolved and one of which is definitely related to Clear Linux itself: I believe my installation is misidentifying the number of NUMA nodes my machine has. I run a dual AMD EPYC 7k62 machine which is capable of being split in up to 4 NUMA nodes (NPS=2) and the exact same software run under Windows or Mint reveal 4 NUMA nodes but for some reason sees only 2 once run under Clear Linux. I found while investigating the (now resolved) hugepage issue that the directory hierarchy of the Clear linux install (I don’t recall where exactly) accounts for only 2 NUMA nodes. Any way I can solve this ? Could that be hindering the performance ?
Thanks for any contribution.
P.S. is there any possible way I can undervolt (beyond just forcing a P-state) my processors to save on the electric bill too for when perfect absolute stability is not essential ?