[iChat is the worst, with Leopard I need to put BOINC on snooze whilst on a chat other wise the video is really jerky and the sound keeps dropping out. This was not a problem under Tiger.

When BOINC and E&H runs sound playback in iTunes gets "jerky" e.g. every few seconds there's a hiccup (like some buffer is running empty). The problem vanishes when closing BOINC.

Also this is not Itunes specific, because it happens with VLC to (albeit it may be using the same QT libs iTunes does).

Are you still seeing these problems, or have things improved with time?

I've not been able to reproduce the iTunes issue, even though I'm running on one of the original Intel iMacs (2 cores at 2GHz.) I'm not set up to do video iChat so I haven't tested that.

However, I noticed that the system was quite sluggish after I first installed Leopard. Among many other things, the SETI@home and Einstein@home screensaver graphics were quite jerky. But now the general sluggishness has disappeared, and the graphics are smooth again.

I did notice that even though I installed Leopard over an existing Tiger installation, Spotlight proceeded to index all my files all over again. :=(

I don't know if this was the (only) reason, but the problems I saw (not just with BOINC) seem to have disappeared after a couple of weeks.

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Charlie Fenton
BOINC / SETI@home Macintosh & Windows Programmer

Are you still seeing these problems, or have things improved with time?

I'm still seeing both issues, iChat video is still jerky and iTunes playback skips - not all the time but way more than with Tiger.

I've not been able to reproduce the iTunes issue, even though I'm running on one of the original Intel iMacs (2 cores at 2GHz.) I'm not set up to do video iChat so I haven't tested that.

Unfortunately things haven't improved here.

You might try with a video podcast, as it happens quite fast then.

Hi FYI Upgrading to leopard :
I went through the upgrade steps but the mac wouldn't restart. Apple support had me log in in safe mode, and delete all my start up items : hey presto, I can login to the new leopard.

I had ten auto starting applications, any one of them could have caused this error - but the only 'unusual' item was the boinc manager.

(BTW : delete start up items by going into system prefs/accounts/click on the user/login items and delete the list that is presented.)

This may be merely anecdotal but perhaps its of assistance to someone.

I've been running the BOINC daemon script for Macs in the computer labs I manage for many months. When we began to deploy Intel iMacs, I began seeing problems that didn't exist with our PPC machines; the PPC machines crunched happily away when no one was using them, and stopped when someone logged in--all the time peacefully co-existing with web-based preferences.

Now, with both Leopard and Tiger machines, I have to set preferences to "Run Always" and "Network Always Available" in order to crunch units. This is causing a HUGE performance hit when students need to use the machines for assignments.

I've heard rumors that a factor in all this is Apple's implementation of launchd to replace start-up items.

I hope that someone can do something to return BOINC/Charlie's shell script to the days of yore, because it looks as if when classes resume January 8, my five labs of Intel iMacs won't be running BOINC anymore.

I've been running the BOINC daemon script for Macs in the computer labs I manage for many months. When we began to deploy Intel iMacs, I began seeing problems that didn't exist with our PPC machines

I think I've found the problem and have checked in a fix. Watch for the release of 5.10.33.

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Charlie Fenton
BOINC / SETI@home Macintosh & Windows Programmer

I think I've found the problem and have checked in a fix. Watch for the release of 5.10.33.

I've posted BOINC 5.10.33. You can get it from the download_all page or download it directly from http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dl/boinc_5.10.33_macOSX_universal.zip.

I found that the Make_BOINC_Service.sh script did not work for me under OS 10.5.1, so I updated it. I tested it briefly and it seems to work under both OS 10.5.1 and OS 10.4.11. You can get the new version from the Mac Admin Tools page or download it directly from http://boinc.berkeley.edu/mac_build/Make_BOINC_Service.sh.

Please post another public message to the Leopard forum thread if this doesn't work for you.

The currentMake_BOINC_Service.sh script does not use the launchd mechanism. I hope to write a new script soon which uses launchd, though I'm not certain if BOINC can use launchd for technical reasons. if I'm successful, I will send you another message and I hope you can test it for me.

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Charlie Fenton
BOINC / SETI@home Macintosh & Windows Programmer

Hey Charlie!

I have the updated daemon script and 5.10.33 running in our brand-spankin'-new lab of 20" 2.4 GHz iMacs and things appear to working swimmingly. I expect to see some results turning up for these machines by noon EST.

Thanks so much for the attention to this. For maintenance reasons we leav these machines on and I'd much rather they did something other than sit there.

I've got 5 labs (100+ iMacs (1.83 GHz Core Duos, 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duos, and the aforementioned 2.4 machines)) AND official permission to run distributed computing projects in them. We're runnin' Tyger for production and Leper for internal testing (*mebbe* gonna deploy it Spring term).

Happy to test things out anytime.

Hmmmmm....

This combo appears to not work so well on pre-Santa Rosa chipset machines Intel iMacs.

Runs all the time regardless of what I tell the local prefs to do.

Hmmmmm....

This combo appears to not work so well on pre-Santa Rosa chipset machines Intel iMacs.

Runs all the time regardless of what I tell the local prefs to do.

I ran extensive tests under both OS 10.4.11 and 10.5.1 using a very early (January 2006) Intel 20-inch 2.0 GHz iMac, and I was not able to reproduce this. I did find some situations where it never ran, though.

How did you determine that it runs all the time? Please remember that the Activity Monitor utility and ps command-line tool may continue to list project applications even when they are suspended, because BOINC doesn't remove them form memory if they have not yet checkpointed.

At the risk of stating the obvious, please open the BOINC Manager and confirm that the Activity menu is set to Run based on preferences and not Run always.

I've made a few additional changes and have posted version 5.10.34 to the download_all page. Please give it a try and let me know if it solves your problem.

Also, I've created a new experimental Make_BOINC_Service.sh script which uses the newer launchd mechanism instead of the old StartupItems method. Once you have things working with the earlier script, I'd appreciate it if you'd give it a try and let me know how it works for you. You can get it from http://boinc.berkeley.edu/mac_build/Make_BOINC_Service.sh. Note: this newest script requires BOINC version 5.10.34.

The earlier script is still available from the Mac Admin Tools page.

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Charlie Fenton
BOINC / SETI@home Macintosh & Windows Programmer

I wonder if maybe I need to do a clean install of BOINC.

The machines with initial success were brand new; the machines that run all the time regardless of preferences have been around a while. I'm in the process of re-imaging anyway.

I use Grid View to check out what's happening on my BOINC machines. Historically, when I would log in on machines running your script, all work would be suspended ("User logged in" type of message).

Now, the older machines keep chunkin' away on the data with corresponding ticking of the clocks.

The older machines are also the 1.83 Core Duos which are exhibiting interesting differences from the Core 2 Duos anyway. Maybe that's the difference as opposed to the Santa Rosa chipset...

It's opening week for winter semester here, so I'm a bit busy with some other things. When it calms down (or during eyes of pedagogical hurricanes) I'll run the current set-up that works so well with the new machines on our two models of older machines with clean installs of BOINC.

Please bear in mind that I'm an English major who left DOS.whatever in the mid-80s to groove on the Mac Plus--and I'm not a fan AT ALL of OS X.

Yes, I was sad when the dinosaurs died.

I've been having a problem that looks the same to me as the issue the initial poster had. BOINC Manager hangs for exactly a minute every time there is BOINC-related network activity. I opened a thread discussing the issue here.

I have come to believe this has something to do with BOINC Manager - boinc core client interoperability when BM asks for Network connections.

I've been having a problem that looks the same to me as the issue the initial poster had. BOINC Manager hangs for exactly a minute every time there is BOINC-related network activity. I opened a thread discussing the issue here.

I've posted BOINC development version 5.10.40 for the Mac to the Alpha Download Page. This version does asynchronous DNS lookups. Please post here to let me know if it fixes your problem.

Cheers,
--Charlie

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Charlie Fenton
BOINC / SETI@home Macintosh & Windows Programmer

I have the original 8-way intel Mac Pro. Under Tiger, everything ran fine with 5.10.41. All 8 CPUs were at 100%, and nice showed correctly.

Today I did a clean wipe/install of Leopard. Now BOINC tasks show as user, instead of nice. If I read an earlier post in this thread correctly, that is a problem with Activity Monitor and/or MenuMeters. Fine. Annoying, but letting it go for now.

The really troubling problem that I am seeing is total CPU usage. Under Tiger, MenuMeters showed all 8 as 100% pegged, all the time. Now, the individual graphs are all jagged with peaks and valleys, and when I set it to "show average for multiple processors a single display" (similar to the way that windows does it) it is showing only about 80% usage. Top shows about 80% as well.

I just lost 20% of my processing power! Help!

Edit: A snapshot of the Activity Monitor is on my downloads page.

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Reno, NV
Team: SETI.USA

Good news! The 10.5.2 update helped! My CPU usage was around 80%, not in the high 90%. Still not up to 100% though.

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Reno, NV
Team: SETI.USA