My 4 CPU are constantly every 10s between 30% and 100%.

How can I set up BOINC to stop oscillating and top the CPU performance constantly?

The 'oscillating' is the result of BOINC by default running only part time, to keep operating temps down for laptops, that don't have adequate cooling to run full out. Every 10 seconds, suggests you've set the CPU time percent to 90% (run 9 seconds, pause 1 second). Set it to 100% and the pause/run alternation is gone [Computing preference: Use at most 100% of CPU time].

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Coelum Non Animum Mutant, Qui Trans Mare Currunt

You are right. I change the value 60 to 100 of my cpu_usage_limit in my configuration file /var/lib/boinc-client/global_prefs.xml.


1. with 60%

<global_preferences>
    <cpu_usage_limit>60.0</cpu_usage_limit>
<global_preferences> 

2. with 100%

<global_preferences>
    <cpu_usage_limit>100.0</cpu_usage_limit>
<global_preferences> 

Ahum, the global_pref.xml is populated from the project website device location profiles, so a local edit runs the risk of being overwritten soon as you change something at any of your projects, i.e best visit any of your project preference pages and change the value there, then run an client update project to transfer to the new pref to the client.

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Coelum Non Animum Mutant, Qui Trans Mare Currunt

The 'oscillating' is the result of BOINC by default running only part time, to keep operating temps down for laptops, that don't have adequate cooling to run full out. Every 10 seconds, suggests you've set the CPU time percent to 90% (run 9 seconds, pause 1 second). Set it to 100% and the pause/run alternation is gone [Computing preference: Use at most 100% of CPU time].

If thermals are the problem limit the frequency, not the duty cycle.

The best thing is to fully load a core but also make sure that core isn't running near maximum frequency or power.

Try this in a command shell:

cd /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq
ls
cd ondemand
ls
more ignore_nice_load

if the value is set to "0" you should set it to 1 instead.

you need to do this as an admin. so type
sudo bash
then edit the file ignore_nice_load with your fave txt editor (eg pico).

Alternatively you can also use a little program i wrote:

http://ee.freeshell.org/Slow/slowNice3.c
http://ee.freeshell.org/Slow/

I haven't figured out how to make the cpufreq ondemand ignore nice setting stick. so i usualy run my little program.

You can't have nice stick, because the science apps are [by design] set to that lowest level, to yield to all and every non-BOINC process. Of course you can cron this every time a new task loads, but some project will reload at every completed step... a control process and a worker, which is the part for some projects that reloads many times, at each sub-job such as with Clean Energy.

My Ubuntu actually has an app icon on the top bar where I can flip the ondemand / max / lower frequency quickly... no bashing in a shell at all.

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Coelum Non Animum Mutant, Qui Trans Mare Currunt

Yes I'm always on the Ondemand governor as well. The problem was, that tasks that were niced (to the highest level 19) would still cause the processor to jump to its highest frequency, causing heat and fan to spin up (as well as poor perf/watt), and even hogging memory bandwidth (which is not something you want when the computer is in use).

After setting the '1' in the file
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/ondemand/ignore_nice_load

the problem behavior goes away. This is a much better governor setting, and I don't know why it's not enabled by default, at least in Mint 17.3, which is Ubuntu based.

I'm assuming it's set the same way in Ubuntu.