Fast performance tips¶
Lightning builds in all the micro-optimizations we can find to increase your performance. But we can only automate so much.
Here are some additional things you can do to increase your performance.
Dataloaders¶
When building your DataLoader set num_workers > 0
and pin_memory=True
(only for GPUs).
Dataloader(dataset, num_workers=8, pin_memory=True)
num_workers¶
The question of how many num_workers
is tricky. Here’s a summary of
some references, [1], and our suggestions.
num_workers=0
means ONLY the main process will load batches (that can be a bottleneck).num_workers=1
means ONLY one worker (just not the main process) will load data but it will still be slow.The
num_workers
depends on the batch size and your machine.A general place to start is to set
num_workers
equal to the number of CPUs on that machine.
Warning
Increasing num_workers
will ALSO increase your CPU memory consumption.
The best thing to do is to increase the num_workers
slowly and stop once you see no more improvement in your training speed.
Spawn¶
When using accelerator=ddp_spawn
(the ddp default) or TPU training, the way multiple GPUs/TPU cores are used is by calling .spawn()
under the hood.
The problem is that PyTorch has issues with num_workers > 0
when using .spawn()
. For this reason we recommend you
use accelerator=ddp
so you can increase the num_workers
, however your script has to be callable like so:
python my_program.py --gpus X
.item(), .numpy(), .cpu()¶
Don’t call .item()
anywhere in your code. Use .detach()
instead to remove the connected graph calls. Lightning
takes a great deal of care to be optimized for this.
empty_cache()¶
Don’t call this unnecessarily! Every time you call this ALL your GPUs have to wait to sync.
Construct tensors directly on the device¶
LightningModules know what device they are on! Construct tensors on the device directly to avoid CPU->Device transfer.
# bad
t = torch.rand(2, 2).cuda()
# good (self is LightningModule)
t = torch.rand(2, 2, device=self.device)
For tensors that need to be model attributes, it is best practice to register them as buffers in the modules’s
__init__
method:
# bad
self.t = torch.rand(2, 2, device=self.device)
# good
self.register_buffer("t", torch.rand(2, 2))
Use DDP not DP¶
DP performs three GPU transfers for EVERY batch:
Copy model to device.
Copy data to device.
Copy outputs of each device back to master.
Whereas DDP only performs 1 transfer to sync gradients. Because of this, DDP is MUCH faster than DP.
When using DDP set find_unused_parameters=False¶
By default we have enabled find unused parameters to True. This is for compatibility issues that have arisen in the past (see the discussion for more information). This by default comes with a performance hit, and can be disabled in most cases.
from pytorch_lightning.plugins import DDPPlugin
trainer = pl.Trainer(
gpus=2,
plugins=DDPPlugin(find_unused_parameters=False),
)
16-bit precision¶
Use 16-bit to decrease the memory consumption (and thus increase your batch size). On certain GPUs (V100s, 2080tis), 16-bit calculations are also faster. However, know that 16-bit and multi-processing (any DDP) can have issues. Here are some common problems.
- CUDA error: an illegal memory access was encountered.
The solution is likely setting a specific CUDA, CUDNN, PyTorch version combination.
CUDA error: device-side assert triggered
. This is a general catch-all error. To see the actual error run your script like so:
# won't see what the error is
python main.py
# will see what the error is
CUDA_LAUNCH_BLOCKING=1 python main.py
Tip
We also recommend using 16-bit native found in PyTorch 1.6. Just install this version and Lightning will automatically use it.
Advanced GPU Optimizations¶
When training on single or multiple GPU machines, Lightning offers a host of advanced optimizations to improve throughput, memory efficiency, and model scaling. Refer to Advanced GPU Optimized Training for more details.
Preload Data Into RAM¶
When your training or preprocessing requires many operations to be performed on entire dataset(s) it can
sometimes be beneficial to store all data in RAM given there is enough space.
However, loading all data at the beginning of the training script has the disadvantage that it can take a long
time and hence it slows down the development process. Another downside is that in multiprocessing (e.g. DDP)
the data would get copied in each process.
One can overcome these problems by copying the data into RAM in advance.
Most UNIX-based operating systems provide direct access to tmpfs through a mount point typically named /dev/shm
.
Increase shared memory if necessary. Refer to the documentation of your OS how to do this.
Copy training data to shared memory:
cp -r /path/to/data/on/disk /dev/shm/
Refer to the new data root in your script or command line arguments:
datamodule = MyDataModule(data_root="/dev/shm/my_data")
Zero Grad set_to_none=True
¶
In order to modestly improve performance, you can override optimizer_zero_grad()
.
For a more detailed explanation of pros / cons of this technique, read this documentation by the PyTorch team.
class Model(LightningModule):
def optimizer_zero_grad(self, epoch, batch_idx, optimizer, optimizer_idx):
optimizer.zero_grad(set_to_none=True)