I have a Dell E1505 with a Core Duo T2500 running on Ubuntu 8.04. Its full clock speed is 2 GHz, but when the computer is idle, it runs at 1 GHz. It can also run at 1.33 GHz and 1.67 GHz, depending on the load. I've noticed that BOINC seems to be a lower priority process, so the CPU stays throttled at 1 GHz. When I have a user process also running at the same time, the CPU ramps up to 2 GHz, and BOINC actually goes faster (I can see the estimated time to completion decrease.) Is there any way to get BOINC to unthrottle the CPU? (I know temperature is not an issue, as the Windows client causes the CPU to step up to 2 GHz. The fans eventually kick in, plus I have a laptop cooler, and the CPU temp will settle in at 60 degrees centigrade.)

I have a Dell E1505 with a Core Duo T2500 running on Ubuntu 8.04. Its full clock speed is 2 GHz, but when the computer is idle, it runs at 1 GHz. It can also run at 1.33 GHz and 1.67 GHz, depending on the load. I've noticed that BOINC seems to be a lower priority process, so the CPU stays throttled at 1 GHz. When I have a user process also running at the same time, the CPU ramps up to 2 GHz, and BOINC actually goes faster (I can see the estimated time to completion decrease.) Is there any way to get BOINC to unthrottle the CPU? (I know temperature is not an issue, as the Windows client causes the CPU to step up to 2 GHz. The fans eventually kick in, plus I have a laptop cooler, and the CPU temp will settle in at 60 degrees centigrade.)

This is becoming an increasingly common question.

There has been a long discussion about it at SETI (with suggestions for how to deal with it), and two recent threads at Einstein here and here.

But I agree that it's a general BOINC issue, not specific to any one project, and the best place to discuss it is here at BOINC - though possibly in the 'BOINC core client' area rather than the 'BOINC Manager' area.

Thank you, Richard and Sekerob, for your prompt replies.

Yes, I admit I should have been a little more thorough with my use of Google... though your suggestion does exactly what I need. I suppose I did misplace my thread, although you could say that boinc manager could execute the cpufreq command... a bit of a hack there though.

I'm not a 24/7 contributer, so I'd rather not disable the CPU throttling features; this is a laptop, after all. I just saved "sudo cpufreq-selector -g performance" and "sudo cpufreq-selector -g ondemand" as shell scripts and added them to my Applications/System Tools menu. Perhaps I'll add "sudo cpufreq-selector -g performance" to BOINC's run_manager file.

Either way, problem solved. The Linux client performance is now more or less equal to its Windows-based counterpart (a little slower, but that's negligible.) Thanks to all for your incredibly prompt response.