New poster, sorry if this has been asked before, but I couldn't find anything.

When running SETI on this rather pedestrian rebuild of an old Acer Aspire T-160, (AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual core 3800+, 4G RAM, WinXP), the CPU utilization paints vertical pinstripes, with a full cycle frequency of 3 or 4 seconds.

BOINC is up to date, the settings look reasonable to me, and other CPU-intensive apps are able to pin the usage high at 100%. What does BOINC keep having to wait for?

Thanks in advance.
TMA-1

I don't have an answer, but I would also like to say that when I try to limit my CPU time in BOINC Manager, it goes up to 100, suspends from high usage, starts, and repeats.

Have you checked your preferences to make sure "Use at most XX% of CPU time" has not been changed? That's how that setting is implemented. If the preferences are correct and it only occurs on one project's apps, you will have to ask at their respective forums.

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My Detailed BOINC Stats

Thanks noderaser, you've nailed it.

I changed it from 80% to 100%, and now the CPUs are pinned high.

I guess I made wrong assumptions about what that parameter meant. I thought it was the proportion of BOINC to overall CPU load. Instead it seems to be a high water mark of sorts--if you hit the mark, back off. Poor BOINC was spending all its time throttling up and down like a rattled student driver.

I'll fix my other computer's setting too, now that I know. Thanks again.

I used to think the same thing. It refers to how often it computes. For example, 50% means that tasks will run every other second, while 80% means they'll run on average for 4 out of every 5 seconds.

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If you want to reduce the amount of load BOINC places on your CPU, I would suggest reducing the number of CPU cores you allow BOINC to use. (And leave CPU utilization at 100%.)

I used to think the same thing. It refers to how often it computes. For example, 50% means that tasks will run every other second, while 80% means they'll run on average for 4 out of every 5 seconds.

Wait, so that's what it's supposed to do?! I thought it meant instead of pegging at 100% it would peg at whatever value you set! I guess this makes more sense, but it's really annoying listening to the fans spinning up and down.

It's been like that for a long time, IIRC the reasons were because there isn't/wasn't a reliable way to actually scale the CPU percentage and limit BOINC computation to a certain percentage across platforms.

That's odd that your fans throttle so quickly, most of the systems I've ever had seem to throttle according to a running average temperature over some seconds.

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My Detailed BOINC Stats

It's not just been like that for a long time, it's been like that since its inception. It is done this way because BOINC needs to be able to do this on all platforms it is used on, without it then requiring interaction with some API.
If you want a sustained certain percentage throttling, use third party applications. Threadmaster, TThrottle.

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