As much as I love to help in the name of science and stuff, ever since I installed BOINC, the processes tied to it have been sucking away too much CPU power from my virtual machine, causing it to crash, and forcing me to go through the lengthy restart process. Now surely BOINC can be configured to run at idle priority, much like Folding@Home, no?

Projects determine what priority they give their science applications, but rule of thumb is to give CPU applications Low priority (Windows) and GPU applications at Below Normal priority. That GPU applications run at a slighter higher priority, is because otherwise they just won't do any work.

The BOINC processes themselves (boinc.exe and boincmgr.exe) run at normal priority, because they are just the managing program and its user interface. They don't use the CPU that much, nor do any of the science.

All the priority settings allow for the science applications to run work on the remaining cycles left over by the rest of the applications running at Normal or higher priority.

If the virtual machine is taking up so much CPU power, you have the choices of:
1. Not running BOINC at the same time as the VM. Set the VM as an exclusive application, so that BOINC suspends whenever the VM is in memory.
2. Set BOINC to use less than 100% of the CPU cores, so that the VM can run on the cores that are freed.
3. Set the VM to use less CPU cores. E.g. when you have a 4 core CPU and you tell the VM to use all 4, there is nothing left for anything else to run and system stability will be troublesome.
4. Or just do not run BOINC on that system.

If you also want to run FAH at the same time as BOINC and a VM, you must have a pretty powerful machine to be able to do all that.

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No, F@H was just a comparison. I'm afraid my VM must run at all times.

The problem is that even though my VM is at normal priority, those BOINC processes (it's easier to call them that) at low priority still take away CPU power from the VM. I don't think it works by taking whatever CPU power is left over from normal priority processes, otherwise this wouldn't be an issue.

Oh well, if there's no option to make it idle priority, I've got my answer then. Thanks.

The problem is that even though my VM is at normal priority, those BOINC processes (it's easier to call them that) at low priority still take away CPU power from the VM. I don't think it works by taking whatever CPU power is left over from normal priority processes, otherwise this wouldn't be an issue.

Then the VM isn't taking up 100% CPU cycles all the time. Which it doesn't necessarily do.

Now, I don't know which VM you're using, but I run Linux at times in VirtualBox 1.4.2, and the only problem here is that when I set the VM to use a certain amount of memory that it will always use that. And that will slow my PC down. But setting the VM with a 'normal' amount of memory and that it can only use 2 CPUs of my 4, will allow my BOINC to run and the VM to run without problems.

Of course, YMMV.

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I'm using ubuntu-server as my VM, and it runs several instances of MJ12. If you don't know what that is, doesn't matter. However, every few minutes (sometimes much more. It's random) it will archive, and cause a spike in CPU usage. If there isn't enough CPU power, there is a slight chance that the VM locks up completely and irreversibly, until it is reset.

But at this point, I'm really just complaining for the sake of complaining, so I'll end it here.