Recently, (ie. a week or two...), I have seen this machine, whilst idle apart from BOINC, have the status "Suspended CPU is busy". It has become common enough for me to have the Windows Task Manager open all the time, so I could see what it is that is making the CPU busy. Failed, it looks completely normal. It does not stay like that very long. There is nothing else on the machine that uses much CPU.

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Recently, (ie. a week or two...), I have seen this machine, whilst idle apart from BOINC, have the status "Suspended CPU is busy". It has become common enough for me to have the Windows Task Manager open all the time, so I could see what it is that is making the CPU busy. Failed, it looks completely normal. It does not stay like that very long. There is nothing else on the machine that uses much CPU.

What %age do o you have it set to?

It could easily be something like Windows Update or the antivirus.

I was wondering how much memory it has, and if it's running VMs.

I have two machines under my desk. At last rebuild time, both had the same motherboard, ASUS Sabertooth Z170, (their spelling of sabre), 4GHz i7's, 16GB RAM, same SSD. I do not overclock. Both have the same Bitdefender anti virus, which updates itself, and the same Windows 8.1, both are connected to the same router and onward to another router on the ground floor, and onwards from there. Both systems are set to use 100%.
The only difference BOINC wise, is this machine allows GPU projects, the other does not. They have the same graphics cards, but the other machine appears to be suffering, arrays of black spots over parts of the screen, so I stopped GPU computing on it. Otherwise, their portfolios are the same.
I see the issue on this machine alone.

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I was wondering if you had another, similar machine for comparison, but thought that was too much to hope for. :)

So, unless there's a problem with the seating of one or more chips, perhaps uneven thermal paste, which is causing said chip(s) to overheat, it looks like the mix of programs that are running.
Especially if it's a gpu matter.

And 16Gig of ram isn't much these days. Even if it's just a few Megs short of what's being used at times.

The machines were rebuilt some years ago. I've been building my own since the late '90's, I would have expected poor heat control or seating to have manifested itself before now. The heatsinks on the processors are oversized, quite enormous in fact. It, would suprise me, I think I've been doing this long enough to know how to spread Arctic Silver for example. I had been seriously considering another 16GB RAM in each however.

Software wise, I use this machine more than the other, C++ stuff mostly, but not recently. I am talking to a team in England about building some stats pages for their website. That will be PHP and MySQL, but I've not really started with that yet, I've not used PHP before so a bit of a teach in, although this has been largely from a book so far. In any event, I would seriously doubt that was the reason, I have done some quite heavy C++ development/modification jobs in recent years on this machine for example, (MS Visual C++ Professional).

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I am still seeing this. Once or twice a day. I set the task manager up as a more or less constant window on the screen to see what was using the CPU, as it says, the CPU is busy, I wanted to see what was making the CPU busy... it shows the CPU idle.

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[QuoteI am still seeing this. Once or twice a day. [/Quote]

Sounds like a repeating scheduled task like Windows Updates, ANTIVIRUS Updates... etc..

Have you checked in the Windows event log to see if there are any reoccurring notices day?

Have you checked to see what is in the Windows Task Scheduler to see what is automatically set to run as a repeating Daily background task?

When Boinc detects CPU usage above the set limit it will pause the calculation for 60 seconds. But it will detect a much shorter spike of CPU activity. So it might be tricky to visually detect that short high non-Boinc activity when it occurs.

It's been so long since I used Windows that I don't remember if the Task Manager shows system processes by default or that you have to toggle them on. I thought that the Task Manager only showed user processes and so it could be a system process that is spiking cpu activity and thus BOINC is suspending.

It depends on which version of Windows you're using.

Windows 7 shows user tasks by default, but shows a clear button - 'Show processes from all users' - to include system and service uses as well. [bottom left of window]

Windows 10 and 11 have a toggle in the same place for 'More details' / 'Fewer details'.

I'm running 8.1. The task manager "Processes" tab, the default, has a lot of processes on it, the obvious tasks I know I am running, the BOINC tasks, a whole flock of processes running under the BOINC tasks and a good number of Windows tasks, Windows Log-on Application, etc.
I still don't know what is causing the short outages when the CPU is busy. I've not seen an outage last more than a minute.
It is a little odd, but realisticaly, is not causing huge problems, although with more attention on it, I can see it is happening more that once or twice a day. Only on this machine too, I usually have BOINC Manager from the other system on my desktop also.

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Later, I wondered about that...

>>> I usually have BOINC Manager from the other system

... coud the local BOINC be talking to the other system at these times? Formulating an experiment......

Looking at the event log, I can see this is happening A LOT more than once or twice per day. They are not the 60 second windows either, most are 10 seconds.

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14/01/2022 10:21:04 | | Suspending computation - CPU is busy
14/01/2022 10:21:14 | | Resuming computation

Still happens without the BOINC Manager window from my other machine.shown, and on an otherwise quiet machine. These 10 seconds gaps on all cores/threads numerous times a day start mounting up. BOINC is version 7.16.20 (x64). Any idea what is causing that?

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14/01/2022 10:21:04 | | Suspending computation - CPU is busy
14/01/2022 10:21:14 | | Resuming computation

Still happens without the BOINC Manager window from my other machine.shown, and on an otherwise quiet machine. These 10 seconds gaps on all cores/threads numerous times a day start mounting up. BOINC is version 7.16.20 (x64). Any idea what is causing that?

In your preferences what is “Suspend when non-Boinc CPU usage is above” set to?

I’m guessing that it’s low and a housekeeping task like your anti-virus, windows update check or file indexing is triggering it.

Use at most 100% of CPU's
Use at most 100% CPU time

Suspend when on battery... yes - it never is, it does not have a battery, it is a mains powered desktop.
Suspend when non-BOINC... 80%

Other suspend categories are not checked. The other practically identical machine, (same MoBo, CPU, RAM, SSD, GPU etc.), does not show this., but, I am looking at its BOINC Manager on this machine, it might if I moved the screen etc. over to its location. As stated above, the BOINC Manager display from the other machine being deleted does not stop the interruptions, I had an idea that it might be that, but no.

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With the task manager open, I saw today, that when one of these events occurs, the CPU usage list drops to less than 10%. This is all very weird.

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Does anyone have any ideas? I am still seeing this, on this machine only, several times a day, and checking the logs, a lot of times per day, but only on this machine?!?!?!?!?

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Does anyone have any ideas? I am still seeing this, on this machine only, several times a day, and checking the logs, a lot of times per day, but only on this machine?!?!?!?!?

Did you ever DISABLE (set to NO) Suspend when on battery?

Post your first 30 or so lines from when you start BOINC.

>>> Did you ever DISABLE (set to NO) Suspend when on battery?

No. As I said above, I don't see how that could be relavent, since it is 24/7 mains powered. I have set it to NO now, and am still seeing the issue. I would also point out that my second practically identical machine also does not have that set to NO, and does not show the interuptions.

>>> Post your first 30 or so lines from when you start BOINC.

BOINC starts automatically at system startup, so it is not something I do exactly. There might be a log file somewhere though that has any startup messages, but I don't know what that is called.

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Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.