My not-very-authoritative but also obvious answer is that multiple cores
will give you better performance. I have good results running Gazebo + rviz
on a Core 2 Quad desktop (4 core @ 3GHz, no hyperthreading) and also running
it on a laptop with Core i7 (4 cores @ 1.6Ghz + 4 virtual cores). I haven't
studied this carefully, but I have noticed that my gazebo simulation runs
faster on the C2Q as long as not much else is going on, presumably because
of the higher clock speed, but as soon as I start running a lot of other
processing the net speed is better on my i7 machine with the virtual cores,
despite the lower clock.

I'm not sure if this will help you with your current single-core machine,
but I have definitely had success running Gazebo on my laptop, literally
using it as a virtual PR2, and doing other processing and visualization on
my desktop. Do you have a faster machine you can run Gazebo on?

--Adam


Adam Leeper
Stanford University
aleeper@stanford.edu
719.358.3804


On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 6:06 PM, Alex Barvo <robotnv@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello everybody,
>
> When I run Gazebo and rviz on my Athlon 64 3500 (one core) 5 year old
> machine running Kubuntu Lucid 32-bit,
> the cturtle looks more like a c-snail. With CPU at 100% all the time, I see
> updates in rviz about every 5 seconds.
> So it takes about 30 minutes to get across a hall of WG.
> Which is not that much fun, and now I'm looking at the ways to improve this
> situation:
> a) Upgrade processor to dual-core AMD Athlon 64 X2 (dual core) and install
> 64-bit Linux.
> b) Run Gazebo on another machine
> c) Get a new AMD Phenom II X6 (six cores) machine
> d) Try to mess with performance of Gazebo as outlined by John here:
> http://ros-users.122217.n3.nabble.com/cpu-usage-of-Gazebo-td911241.html#a913849
>
>  I searched this list for AMD/Athlon and did not find much.
> I'm guessing that's because WG uses Intel Quad Core i7 Xeon processors.
>
>  What would you guys recommend?
>
> I understand it's hard to recommend PC hardware, but I'm asking here to get
> a feel of what would be a good solution that will get me going with ROS for
> another couple of years.
>
> So far my impression is ROS is highly multi-process system and probably
> going to get even more so in the near future. Thus I was looking for a CPU
> with more cores. Am I going in the right direction?
>
> Thank you for your time,
> Alex
>
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