That's awfully strange. I tried it on a quad-core CPU with hyperthreading, and got about 120Kh/s at about 400% CPU usage. I'm not sure what to tell you; one thing you can try is specifying the number of mining threads in the setgenerate command, e.g.
setgenerate true 4
for 4 threads.
Well yeah, I did try setting the number of threads with the setgenerate command. See above.
A few further tries indicates that there is some kind of bottleneck above 4 threads.
setgenerate true 1: 36Kh/s, 101% CPU (61% idle)
setgenerate true 2: 69Kh/s, 198% CPU (52% idle)
setgenerate true 3: 98Kh/s, 290% CPU (35% idle)
setgenerate true 4: 115Kh/s, 366% CPU (27% idle)
setgenerate true 5: 90Kh/s, 360% CPU (26% idle)
setgenerate true 6: 68Kh/s, 283% CPU (35% idle)
setgenerate true 7: 47Kh/s, 262% CPU (39% idle)
setgenerate true 8: 46Kh/s, 259% CPU (37% idle)
I doubt I'm running out of RAM—I have almost 9GB free with everything running right now. The only thing I can think of is that my slow 800MHz DDR2 RAM could be the bottleneck. But that seems intuitively farfetched.
If I set the Windows CPUminer to four threads (-t 4) and setgenerate true 4 I'm getting nearly 18KH/s per thread in CPUminer plus 48Kh/s in Securecoin for a total of 120Kh/s. For whatever reason I'm maxing out at 120Kh/s.
Confirmed: this is true even if I am running the Windows Securecoin client and the Mac Securecoin client concurrently.
Just for comparison's sake, on the laptop I get:
setgenerate true 1: 37KH/s, 100% CPU (63% idle)
setgenerate true 2: 54KH/s, 198% CPU (39% idle)
setgenerate true 3: 58KH/s, 270% CPU (14% idle)
setgenerate true 4: 57KH/s, 320% CPU (3% idle)
Since this machine has only two cores, this supports your assertion that the addition of hyperthreaded virtual cores does not help. (Which sort of makes sense.)
Ultimately you'll probably be better off with the Securecoin version of cpuminer, if you can get it compiling--it's way better optimized than any of the wallets.
That is what I thought, but I actually had better results with the Windows Qt client mining than with the Windows CPUminer. Again, there may be a lot more going on. But it is interesting. And useful to know that I may as well not run my CPUs full tilt if I'm not getting anything more out of them. On the laptop I get 54KH/s with my CPU at 80°C or 57KH/s at 97°C. Guess which one is better for the life of my CPU.
Thanks for listening. I think I've established here that I am running up against limits of my own system, whatever those limits are. This does not seem to indicate any changes to the Qt client.