Hello all. I was wondering if it is possible to have BOINC run at a low CPU usage (not suspended) while I am working, and have it run at high CPU usage while I am idle(screensaver running). I know BOINC can be suspended during non-idle periods, but I have a 3GHz processor, and usually am using only 30% of it. Does anyone know how to do this, and what to do to enable it?

Not yet. Many hope it will once come.

Peter

...I was wondering if it is possible to have BOINC run at a low CPU usage (not suspended) while I am working...

This is the default behaviour of BOINC as the science applications should be run at the lowest priority that your OS supports. So, providing that you have enough memory to avoid swapping, you should see little performance impact from letting BOINC run 100% all the time. However your PC will get hotter due to the 100% loading, so you need to keep an eye on the CPU temperatures. Overheating is more likely to be a problem with generic consumer grade kit, which will have the minimum cooling capacity needed for day-to-day work.

Andrew

To quote myself from a related thread:

I believe that both Working and Idle state should contain an arbitrarily manageable set of preferences (CPU % throttling, %/number of CPU cores, memory usage, etc.) just like it is with with preference sets for venues.

There are also other suggestions around.

Peter

Related to the new CUDA-Features it seems to be necessary to be able to turn this on when idle and vice versa.
On my PC I've setup BOINC to "always on", but since my graphics card (GeForce 8600GT) is hardly suitable, I cannot use the computer when GPUGRID-tasks are run!
When I setup "run on idle" I would waste 90% of the computing capacity...

(in case this should be handled as a new issue, may be someone can put it into TRAC?)

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cu/2
Torsten

(in case this should be handled as a new issue, may be someone can put it into TRAC?)

I already did that a while ago: [trac]#801[/trac]

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Thanks Jord,

I haven't seen that thread/ticket. Let's hope there'll be a good solution before CUDA becomes standard in BOINC...

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cu/2
Torsten