I'm running a 12 virtual core Mac Pro running macOS High Sierra 10.13

I've been running BOINC for many years and never had this particular problem. But just recently, I started running yoyo@home. And with that project, I only seem to be able to run 8 yoyo work units at a time, with all other work units showing the "Waiting for shared memory" message.

What does this mean? My system has 7 GB of RAM, which isn't a TON for sure, but also the memory pressure is green on this system and really low. Show maybe around 25%, which is very low. BOINC client itself is configured to use 90% of my RAM.

So what exactly is going on here? It seems weird. I've been running projects like LHD, Einstein, Rosetta etc 12 at a time for years. What is it about yoyo@home that seems to limit it to 8 at a time.

My suspicion is it's either some kind of bug, or some kind of unintentionally misleading error message, as there seems to be plenty of RAM available on this system.

I have only run YOYO@home on Android and not recently so don't know what is happening there at the moment. However some tasks with CPDN don't like it on some machines because there is not enough level3 cache.

This may or may not have any relevance to your issue.

Well, for what it's worth, this machine appears to have 256KB of L2 cache per core, and 12 MB of total L3 cache.

It could be you need to configure more shared memory. Some years ago, when CPDN still worked on Macs, I came across a link to this page, which may help:

http://www.spy-hill.net/myers/help/apple/SharedMemory.html

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NG

You need to change and increase the amount of memory BOINC can use overall. Read and follow instructions from link below.
https://boinc.mundayweb.com/wiki/index.php?title=Waiting_for_memory_(5.8_and_above)

It could be you need to configure more shared memory. Some years ago, when CPDN still worked on Macs, I came across a link to this page, which may help:

http://www.spy-hill.net/myers/help/apple/SharedMemory.html

Unfortunately that web page is written for Mac OS 10.3, circa 2005. The entire memory management system in current MacOS is completely different. Also the sysctl stuff is changed too. So that link doesn't really help. I found a bunch of links like that while searching for this problem, but they were all horribly outdated.

Also that page still doesn't make it clear what the actual issue is. Why are yoyo@home work units running in to this problem but no other projects do?

That said, I wonder if enabling performance mode will help this problem. I'll enable it and check back.

Update: Turns out performance server mode doesn't exist on high sierra. But the sysctl.conf file does still work. SO the 2005 solution worked and now I have 12 yoyo work units running at once. I still don't understand what exactly this means, or why only this one project is affected by it. The only change I made was to the shared memory segments, going from 8 to 32 or something like that.

You need to change and increase the amount of memory BOINC can use overall. Read and follow instructions from link below.
https://boinc.mundayweb.com/wiki/index.php?title=Waiting_for_memory_(5.8_and_above)

I'm already using 90%. And even with that setting, very little of my system's memory is being used. So that's definitely not it.[/quote]

It isn't BOINC, and it isn't YOYO per say. The MacO/S itself is running out of memory because each YOYO is asking the O/S to use some shared memory. O/S sets aside X total shared memory at BOOT. Total requests from all the YOYO's adds up to more than the O/S set aside at BOOT.

Why YOYO and not XYZ? You would have to ask the person(s) who wrote the YOYO code.

I would recommend to lower the max amount of tasks Yoyo can do, by editing the app_config.xml file, and allocate the remaining to another project.
Some projects use up very little CPU (especially GPU based projects, though they say they use 0.98 CPU per GPU, they sometimes only use 10%).