I have been running 5.2.13 for a little bit now. All of a sudden today it will consume approximately 1.5 GB (out of 4 GB) memory on my machine, plus use 50% of the CPU. It is so bad that the science applications exit because they don't have any resources.

The only way to get out is to exit is to end the process under the task manager. When I start up BOINC again, it goes for a couple of minutes and then starts in with the memory and the CPU.

Running: Windows XP Service Pack 2
Science Applications: SETI/Rosetta/Einstein

This is only happening on 1 out of 15 machines that BOINC is running on.

Any suggestions? I have already uninstalled and reinstalled the BOINC client. Thanks.


** ADDITION: This time it errored out with the following error **

***UNHANDLED EXCEPTION****
Reason: Unknown exception (0xe06d7363) at address 0x7C81EB33

1: 12/12/05 15:21:25
1: SymGetLinFromAddr(): GetLastError = 126

** END OF ADDITION **

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What projects are you attached to? You say this starts within a couple of minutes of launch, at least this last time - what project was running at that point?

Normally when BOINC consumes _any_ significant CPU time, it is because it is communicating with some science application. Running "by itself", there is simply little for it to do. If we can verify that this only happens when running one particular project, that will narrow the search considerably.

Also, is there anything "else" that has changed yesterday or today? A new anti-virus program installed, new firewall, ...

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Which project did the error affect...


i must be tired I missed your post Bill.

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BOINC Wiki

It was a bad work unit from either Rosetta or Einstein that caused the problem. I was able to get in and reset both of those project. BOINC is running fine now. Thanks for your help.

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I am fairly new to BOINC, having recently switched from the old SETI system. I am noticing now that my CPU usage ia at 100% when Seti is running in the background and some of my applications are not working properly because of this. When I suspend SETI from the BOINC manager, the CPU usage drops below 20% and jumps back to 100% when I resume SETI. I can not keep SETI on my system if this persists.

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Ronald,

This is as designed. And was the way that SETI@Home Classic worked. IF you do not want it to run while you are using the computer. Change your preference of "work while computer is in use" to no ... set the delay timer. THen use update on the BOINC Manager for the project changed, and now, BOINC and the Science Application will only run when you are not doing anything.

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This is too bad. I'd like to use BOINC but I can't accept that it will max out my CPU to 100% and set my fan to the highest speed. Even with a newer computer it sounds like my machine is going to catch fire. It would be nice to have the ability to limit the CPU usage AND be able to use other applications at the same time.

Without this feature, I'm afraid a lot of potential users will just avoid using the software including myself.

Note that I even installed Threadmaster as recommended and couldn't even get that configured and working. And I'm fairly adept with computers.

I bet there are millions of people that would love to contribute their computers to these projects if they didn't have to be so technically inclined to join and get it working without potentially burning up their PC.

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Processors are designed to run at 100% and they all do just that.

The "tools" you are using to measure that usage only measures the percentage of time the processor is running active programs and processes. The rest of the time it is in a idle loop looking for something to do. This idle loop time is what BOINC projects uses, putting it to good use. Because they are math intensive, these BOINC applications will generate a little more heat than normal. This is only a problem for systems that have heat sink problems to start with, or for some laptops.

BOINC should not be slowing other applications down at all, unless they are programs like the BOINC applications that run only during idle periods. The only case where it might be slowing you down, is if you do not have enough memory in the system, and the operating system is having to use the disk drive swap file a lot when you run a program.

The BOINC developers are looking into putting some of the ThreadMaster logic into some versions of BOINC for some processors. Will have to wait and see if they can do it. But unless a processor or system board has a way to slow it down, other than the idle loop detection, then there really is no way to limit you processor usage. Laptops often have these run slow modes, and some processors do this when they get to hot.