About a month and a half ago I installed BOINC 6.10.18 on a new PC (my old PC had been running an OLD version). The new PC has an nVidia GeForce 8500 GT video card so I am able to use the GPU for SETI@Home. It was working perfectly until about a week ago. I stopped the BOINC Manager from running for a few days while I was doing some other stuff on my PC that I wanted to have all the CPU.

When I put the BOINC Manager back in service I found that it isn't always recognizing when I'm using the computer which, of course, makes everything REALLY slow for the user (me). I did a lot of searching and found other people haveing similar problems, but didn't see any clear cut answers. Here's what I'm seeing, what I've checked, and what I've tried:

This doesn't always happen when I come back to my PC - just sometimes, and I can't find a pattern as to when it happens and when it doesn't.

When the PC is running slow I can open BOINC Manager (slowly) and see that the task percentages and times are still changing.

In Task Manager there is a process called explorer.exe taking up 20-50 percent of the CPU.

In BOINC Manager, clicking Suspend under the Activity Manager makes no difference. It just keeps running. Ditto the Snooze item on the BOINC menu on the system tray icon.

If I exit BOINC Manager it will exit after a few seconds and suddenly my PC is back to normal. Explorer.exe also disappears immediately from Task Manager. (I've seen several other people report that BOINC was slowing things down and they mentioned explorer.exe. The reply was always "BOINC doesn't use explorer.exe and something else on your system must be causing the slowdown." All I know is the system goes back to normal and explorer.exe disappears immediatly when BOINC Manager dies.)

BOINC Manager is set to run based on preferences, and preferences are to NOT run while computer is in use, NOT use GPU while computer is in use, and run only after computer has been idle for 1.00 minute.

I admit I don't understand the difference between the BOINC Manager preferences and the online project preferences, but I went online and made sure the project preferences were set correctly also.

I tried uninstalling BOINC and reinstalling from a freshly downloaded copy of 6.10.18, but that didn't change anything. I didn't want to lose all the tasks SETI was working on so I didn't delete the data folder. I don't know if any settings are stored there that might be part of the problem.

That's all I can think of right now except for my system:
XP SP3 fully patched
2.5 GB memory
A few hundred GB of free drive space
Not using the SETI screen saver
nVidia GeForce 8500 GT

I've got the latest nVidia drivers that are stable on my PC. (Same drivers as when BOINC was working fine.) I haven't seen any signs of the GPU overheating, but I didn't have a way to get the temp readout until a little while ago and I haven't tried running BOINC yet now that I can watch the temp. I'll try that next.

That's all I can think of. Ask me some questions. What am I missing? What else can I check?

Thanks for any help you can give.

Seti tasks are divided into different Angle Ranges, from Very Low Angle Range, (VLAR)(less than 0.2 ish) through Normal Angle Range (around 0.44) up to Very High Angle Range (VHAR)(aka Shorties),
on a Cuda card the VLAR Wu's are done very inefficiently, take a long time, and make the PC very sluggish, Normal AR and VHAR's are no problem,
what you can do is run the reschedule1.9 program, it'll move the VLAR Wu's so they are done on the the CPU instead, available here:

Re: CPU <-> GPU rebranding

Claggy

Explorer.exe is Windows Explorer.

Looking at my Tasks Manager, explorer.exe is there and using 21,296K, and 0 CPU.
Watching this entry while I click on a file to open it, the cpu usage jumps to 11 or 12 for about 1 second and then drops back to zero.

If your copy is using around 50% permanently, then it's rather busy. Perhaps it's some program that you're also running that's keeping it busy.
Have you checked the list of programs in the Startup folder to see what else gets started? There may be something that you've forgotten about, and weren't aware of at all.

Another thing: addons in your browser's toolbar.

What is the CPU? Single, Dual or Quad Core?, what are your cache settings? how many tasks do you have?, Boinc Manager has to display all the tasks once a second,
does hitting 'show active tasks' help?

Claggy

I have a similar problem and i can't solved it.
I set boinc manager to run based on preferences and only run when the computer is idle but when the taks keeps running when my computer is in use.
I'm running Windows 7 but have the same problem on Windows Xp. i've looked for a solution but i didn't founded it therefore and i dont use boinc now.

Toni

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Please start BOINC on either system, checking its startup messages. Do you see a line that says "Reading preferences override file" ?? If you do, you're using the local preferences.

These override any of the same preferences that you set through the project web-site. So if you want to use the web-preferences, you will have to clear the local ones. To do so open BOINC Manager->Advanced view->Advanced->Preferences->click Clear.

Do know that any time you look at the local preferences and click OK, that you save them and start using them immediately. If you merely want to look here, but not use them, exit out the window with Cancel.

Also make sure that BOINC is set to run based on Preferences. Do this through BOINC Manager->Advanced view->Activity->Run based on preferences.

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hi,

i've started boinc on either system with windows xp and verified that use global prefs but problem is not solved. Sometimes the manager don't detects user activity and tasks stops to run but remains in memory slowing the computer.


thanks

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Is boinctray.exe running when the client (not the manager:-) doesn't detect user activity? You can check that with the windows task manager.

Gruß,
Gundolf

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Computer sind nicht alles im Leben. (Kleiner Scherz)

Sometimes the manager don't detects user activity and tasks stops to run but remains in memory slowing the computer.

Check that "Leave applications in memory while suspended?" is set to no in your preferences.

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hi,

it's unmarked...

thanks

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i have boinc.exe boincmgr.exe and boinctray.exe running.

thanks

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