@ggaemo Coincidentally, I just ran into this issue. I picked up some old code for a new project and gave it a spin to see what state it was in. I looked at the htop and saw a scene familiar to yours ALL of my cores were at 100%, not quite as red as yours but 40-50% in the kernel. I think perhaps the more cores the system has, the more contention. This was an 8-core, 16-hthread system, yours is clearly more. The odd thing, the code was only using 2 work processes which makes little sense as to why there was this much activity unless there is some serious spinning in the kernel.
The solution, set pin_memory=False! Problem solved (for me). Most of my newer code has that off by default as it’s caused me nothing but issues in the past.
After seeing another thread on here today using the MNIST example as there starting point, I noticed I can reproduce it with the mnist example. Can you guess which of these screenshots was with pin_memory=True. No other differences… 

Screenshot at 2019-08-21 11-41-33.png2650×250 40.3 KB


Screenshot from 2019-08-21 11-43-44.png2653×243 39.1 KB