dynamips-wxp.exe in GNS3 100% cpu usage

S0lo,

I tried your suggestion by changing through the various idle-pc options, and I must say this is quite annoying. Does everybody have this problem? Does this mean for every router I add to the topology, I have to variably change through 10 settings for the idle-pc? That becomes very tedious, not to mention all the other network devices.

I have dynamips-wxp.exe running in the background using a total of 640,208K of memory. Is this normal? It looks to be that dynamips-wxp.exe is an extreme memory hog.


Cheers,

ZiPPy

I started an entirely new lab in GNS3 and I'm back in the same boat. Your telling me for every single router I have to configure idle-pc??? Or more so search for one that works, between the 10 they offer??? Wow!! :shock:

Are others faced with this task??? I mean, how do people have the patience to do this for every device. Talk about frustration!!


Cheers,

ZiPPy

Hi ZiPPy

No you don't have to idle-pc for every router. You have to idle-pc for every new IOS image you use. So once you do all the images you need, thats it, the idle-pc value gets saved in GNS3 and it will work every time you create a new router using that image. And you should see low CPU usage automatically.

Regarding memory usage, Click [Edit] -> [IOS images and hypervisors]. Then click [IOS images] tab. Try lowering the default RAM for the image entry you are using.

One last thing, GNS3 uses Dynamips and Dynamips is an Emulator, not a Simulator. Emulators try to mimic the exact same router hardware inside your PC, in such a way that the IOS images will really think that they are working in a real router (if I could say so). To do this, there is a tremendous amount of overhead placed on your CPU and memory, imagine it's a machine inside a machine, thats why you feel GNS3 is a memory hog. All emulators are hogs by nature. Thats the price you pay for getting a complete router with all commands for free.

On the other hand Simulators like Packet Tracer or Boson don't consume that much resources. However, the router commands are incomplete, the features you get are way far below what you get in GNS3.

Thank you all for nice info .Idle-pc reduced my core i7 CPU load about 80%. with 4 routers I was running %100 (well i was running it with 4/8 core on top of ESXi 4.1).

thank you again
yashi

Try this also,i use it alot & it works like a charm.
A software called BES : it controls whatever process u want that is using your cpu alot. U can reduce its usage by whatever %age u want. With it u can run as much as 6 routers with Gns3. Hope it helps