Hi!

I joined this project just to test BOINC and do some distributed computing. Like me to cents or something. When I need my computer for something else, the automatic settings usually work OK (i.e. suspend when other CPU usage is over my set percentage), and when they don't (usually when I need 100% responsiveness and the constant BOINC tasks switching on and off causes issues) I just manually suspend BOINC.

However, with Milkyway@Home this is not the case; there seem to be some runaway processes (or, should I call them projects as in the english UI) that consume huge amounts of RAM and / or GPU RAM, make the UI crawl. That would be OK, if they would suspend when told to do so manually, but they don't. The only way to stop them is to stop the whole boinc client as root.

I believe all the processes that cause this behaviour are CUDA-enabled processes. They will finish correctly if left to finish (or, even after attempted suspend if I don't stop boinc client altogether).

Is there a way to find out what is going wrong (and, perhaps, to help Milkyway@home project to debug this?)? Or, is this intended behaviour? If such, running milkyway@home is too much trouble (and prevents me from running other projects while using my computer, even though they would run fine as such).

I'm using Linux (Gentoo), and using NVidia for CUDA.

Cheers!

Replying to myself =).

After posting this, I found out that I'm most probably experiencing a known CUDA issue / lack of feature / bug in BOINC (not Milkyway@Home specific); I had tried wrong search words in Google earlier...

CUDA processes cannot be suspended in several (all?) projects. In addition, they don't respect the CPU usage settings, even thugh they may sometimes use a considerable amount of CPU cycles (in addition to the GPU). This has the consequence, that sometimes they will make the computer very unresponsive even though the settings could give the user the impression that the computing should interfere.

As a workaround, I believe one can only set to not use the GPU at all when the computer is in use.