Posts by andrew.kingwell

1) Message boards : Questions and problems : Question on BOINC CPU usage... (Message 21483)
Posted 24 Nov 2008 by andrew.kingwell
Post:
...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
2) Message boards : Questions and problems : Limiting CPU & RAM from Linux Terminal (Message 20031)
Posted 7 Sep 2008 by andrew.kingwell
Post:
...I start BOINC with "./boinc" from inside a screen session, and everything runs fine, but it always uses 4/4 processors, where as I only want it to use 3/4 processors...


Try editing the "global_prefs_override.xml" file in the BOINC directory and amend the line

<max_ncpus_pct>100.000000</max_ncpus_pct>

to
<max_ncpus_pct>75.000000</max_ncpus_pct>


This will set the BOINC client to use 3/4 of your processors when it re-reads the settings files on startup. From the command line you will need to issue 

boinccmd --read_global_prefs_override

to get the revised settings used at once.

Andrew
3) Message boards : BOINC client : Poll & Discussion: change multiprocessor percentage to something more down-to-earth (Message 19977)
Posted 4 Sep 2008 by andrew.kingwell
Post:
I think most people with a mixed bag of hardware will already use local preferences per BOINC installation. The web based location settings are at too coarse a granularity to handle wide mixes of 1,2,4,8... core set ups. I prefer deal in number of cores on a per machine basis, though I can see the attraction of a "percentage use of my computer" value for a web based default for new users.

So I vote with pepo's option (6) which potentially allows either to be used.

Andrew



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