htop cpu almost red when running tensorflow, predict is very slow - tensorflow

Question

I'm using tensorflow to train a model and predict, and use htop on ubuntu to monitor cpu usage. predict is very slow, I just can't bear it. htop shows that cpu color is almost red, which means almost all cpu resource is used by system kernel threads, but cpu usage is 0% before tensorflow start.
I have not changed the thread_num, I'm using tensorflow v0.11 on ubuntu14.04.

Answer 1

The problem is that default glibc malloc is not efficient for small allocations. Also, because Google develops/tests tensorflow with tcmalloc internally, bad interactions with regular malloc don't get ironed out. The solution is to run TensorFlow with tcmalloc.
sudo apt-get install google-perftools
export LD_PRELOAD="/usr/lib/libtcmalloc.so.4"
python ...

Answer 2

If you're looking for something to improve the inference performance, I could recommend trying OpenVINO. It improves your model's accuracy by converting it to Intermediate Representation (IR), conducting graph pruning, and fusing certain operations into others. Then, in runtime, it uses vectorization. OpenVINO is optimized for Intel hardware, although it should work with any CPU.
It's rather straightforward to convert the Tensorflow model to OpenVINO unless you have fancy custom layers. The full tutorial on how to do it can be found here. Some snippets are below.
Install OpenVINO
The easiest way to do it is using PIP. Alternatively, you can use this tool to find the best way in your case.
pip install openvino-dev[tensorflow]
Use Model Optimizer to convert SavedModel model
The Model Optimizer is a command-line tool that comes from OpenVINO Development Package. It converts the Tensorflow model to IR, which is a default format for OpenVINO. You can also try the precision of FP16, which should give you better performance without a significant accuracy drop (just change data_type). Run in the command line:
mo --saved_model_dir "model" --data_type FP32 --output_dir "model_ir"
Run the inference
The converted model can be loaded by the runtime and compiled for a specific device, e.g., CPU or GPU (integrated into your CPU like Intel HD Graphics). If you don't know what the best choice for you is, use AUTO. If you care about latency, I suggest adding a performance hint (as shown below) to use the device that fulfills your requirement. If you care about throughput, change the value to THROUGHPUT or CUMULATIVE_THROUGHPUT.
# Load the network
ie = Core()
model_ir = ie.read_model(model="model_ir/model.xml")
compiled_model_ir = ie.compile_model(model=model_ir, device_name="AUTO", config={"PERFORMANCE_HINT":"LATENCY"})
# Get output layer
output_layer_ir = compiled_model_ir.output(0)
# Run inference on the input image
result = compiled_model_ir([input_image])[output_layer_ir]
Disclaimer: I work on OpenVINO.