Posts by bugmenot

21) Message boards : BOINC client : boinc resource usage (Message 1992)
Posted 16 Dec 2005 by bugmenot
Post:
Thanks for your reply.

To me, %nice sounds like the amount of time the kernel is spending attending to the niceness of each process, rather than doing something useful, like crunching numbers for boinc.

I suppose my question is - why is the %nice value so high, why isn't boinc showing up in %user?
22) Message boards : BOINC client : boinc resource usage (Message 1983)
Posted 16 Dec 2005 by bugmenot
Post:
BOINC is designed to use every single otherwise-unused CPU cycle on your computer. To do this without impacting other programs, it runs at "nice" priority, meaning "I'll get out of the way nicely when anything else needs time".

So, when BOINC is running, the "% nice" is very high, where before you ran BOINC, the "% idle" was very high. All the % figures will add up of course to 100 - BOINC is just 'moving' the largest figure from the idle column to the 'nice' column. This should have no impact on anything in any of the "real work done" columns.

On my Mac, for example, I'm seeing right now 6% "user", 14% "system", and 80% "nice", with 0% "idle". Since "idle" CPU seconds are "wasted", this looks good to me! :-)


Thanks.

So is the nice value processor overhead (using 80% of the cpu) to keep boinc at a different niceness level?
23) Message boards : BOINC client : boinc resource usage (Message 1921)
Posted 15 Dec 2005 by bugmenot
Post:
When I run boinc, I get very high "% ni" values shown in top (FC4).

I had assumed the ni value was a % nice value, but I can't see how this makes sense. What is "% ni", and why does boinc cause it to be high?


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