Very low GPU usage during training in Tensorflow

I am trying to train a simple multi-layer perceptron for a 10-class image classification task, which is a part of the assignment for the Udacity Deep-Learning course. To be more precise, the task is to classify letters rendered from various fonts (the dataset is called notMNIST).

The code I ended up with looks fairly simple, but no matter what I always get very low GPU usage during training. I measure load with GPU-Z and it shows just 25-30%.

Here is my current code:

graph = tf.Graph()
with graph.as_default():
    tf.set_random_seed(52)

    # dataset definition
    dataset = Dataset.from_tensor_slices({'x': train_data, 'y': train_labels})
    dataset = dataset.shuffle(buffer_size=20000)
    dataset = dataset.batch(128)
    iterator = dataset.make_initializable_iterator()
    sample = iterator.get_next()
    x = sample['x']
    y = sample['y']

    # actual computation graph
    keep_prob = tf.placeholder(tf.float32)
    is_training = tf.placeholder(tf.bool, name='is_training')

    fc1 = dense_batch_relu_dropout(x, 1024, is_training, keep_prob, 'fc1')
    fc2 = dense_batch_relu_dropout(fc1, 300, is_training, keep_prob, 'fc2')
    fc3 = dense_batch_relu_dropout(fc2, 50, is_training, keep_prob, 'fc3')
    logits = dense(fc3, NUM_CLASSES, 'logits')

    with tf.name_scope('accuracy'):
        accuracy = tf.reduce_mean(
            tf.cast(tf.equal(tf.argmax(y, 1), tf.argmax(logits, 1)), tf.float32),
        )
        accuracy_percent = 100 * accuracy

    with tf.name_scope('loss'):
        loss = tf.reduce_mean(tf.nn.softmax_cross_entropy_with_logits(logits=logits, labels=y))

    update_ops = tf.get_collection(tf.GraphKeys.UPDATE_OPS)
    with tf.control_dependencies(update_ops):
        # ensures that we execute the update_ops before performing the train_op
        # needed for batch normalization (apparently)
        train_op = tf.train.AdamOptimizer(learning_rate=1e-3, epsilon=1e-3).minimize(loss)

with tf.Session(graph=graph) as sess:
    tf.global_variables_initializer().run()
    step = 0
    epoch = 0
    while True:
        sess.run(iterator.initializer, feed_dict={})
        while True:
            step += 1
            try:
                sess.run(train_op, feed_dict={keep_prob: 0.5, is_training: True})
            except tf.errors.OutOfRangeError:
                logger.info('End of epoch #%d', epoch)
                break

        # end of epoch
        train_l, train_ac = sess.run(
            [loss, accuracy_percent],
            feed_dict={x: train_data, y: train_labels, keep_prob: 1, is_training: False},
        )
        test_l, test_ac = sess.run(
            [loss, accuracy_percent],
            feed_dict={x: test_data, y: test_labels, keep_prob: 1, is_training: False},
        )
        logger.info('Train loss: %f, train accuracy: %.2f%%', train_l, train_ac)
        logger.info('Test loss: %f, test accuracy: %.2f%%', test_l, test_ac)

        epoch += 1

Here’s what I tried so far:

1. I changed the input pipeline from simple feed_dict to tensorflow.contrib.data.Dataset. As far as I understood, it is supposed to take care of the efficiency of the input, e.g. load data in a separate thread. So there should not be any bottleneck associated with the input.

2. I collected traces as suggested here: https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/1824#issuecomment-225754659
   However, these traces didn’t really show anything interesting. >90% of the train step is matmul operations.

3. Changed batch size. When I change it from 128 to 512 the load increases from ~30% to ~38%, when I increase it further to 2048, the load goes to ~45%. I have 6Gb GPU memory and dataset is single channel 28×28 images. Am I really supposed to use such a big batch size? Should I increase it further?

Generally, should I worry about the low load, is it really a sign that I am training inefficiently?

Here’s the GPU-Z screenshots with 128 images in the batch. You can see low load with occasional spikes to 100% when I measure accuracy on the entire dataset after each epoch.