ROOT is slow on lxplus (MacOS)

I am trying to keep my analysis work in lxplus/ssh however running ROOT on lxplus for me is incredibly slow. As I am on a later MacOS version I am having to use xQuartz to allow X11 forwarding. Running ROOT in zsh/bash terminals is alright and the benchtest rates my machine at some 4750 ROOTmarks, however running the benchtest in my lxplus computing space is so slow that it doesn’t complete the benchmark test within 10 minutes.

Does anyone have recommendations for root running faster with my conditions?

Just to clarify, I use xQuartz to allow X11 forwarding; ROOT runs without this however it will always load up in batch mode on my lxplus space regardless of not including the -b argument.

Cheers,
Tom


ROOT Version: 6.32.06
Platform: MacOS Sequoia 15.0.1
Compiler: Not Provided


Hi Tom,

Thanks for sharing these performance insights and welcome to the ROOT community!

Lxplus at CERN is a great service, offering a common platform to all users. However, sessions run on virtual machines and those are scheduled to optimise the usage of the underlying hosts: in general, as a user, you are well shielded from others but you rarely are using the computing resources alone. Therefore, any performance considerations made on lxplus machines can not be really trusted.

Cheers,
Danilo

Hello @treddel,

in addition to what Danilo said above, sometimes it’s sufficient to log out and go to a different machine. If somebody started some heavy work on the same host as you, this might slow everything down.

Hello, thanks for the replies!

I think I must’ve confused myself when following a framework tutorial - the consensus in my department seems to be that you locally save your output files to use ROOT locally; if you were at CERN whilst using ROOT on lxplus then perhaps it would be quicker due to a much lower latency.

Tom