Hi there, I'm crunching on milkyway@home n-body (mt) WUs
and I observed that it doesn't fully loads the CPU.
It ranges at around 70~80%.

Intel Core i7 Q3610 (4 cores, 8 theads)

Is there any way to increase the load?
I've even checked all project settings and they're okay.

best wishes and a happy new year o/

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Hi there, I'm crunching on milkyway@home n-body (mt) WUs
and I observed that it doesn't fully loads the CPU.
It ranges at around 70~80%.

Intel Core i7 Q3610 (4 cores, 8 theads)

Is there any way to increase the load?
I've even checked all project settings and they're okay.

best wishes and a happy new year o/

That depends on your settings, the default Boinc settings are designed for people who only want Boinc to run in the background having as little influence on the pc as possible. If you wish to tweak some of the settings though you might be able to get a bit more out of the pc, but at the expense of 'responsiveness'.

For instance you could go into the Boinc Manager, down by the clock, and click on Tools, computing preferences, processor usage and change the default 25% setting to zero on the line "while processor usage is less then [] percent (0 means no restriction)". This would make your pc less responsive, but crunch more often as it would not stop when it is otherwise doing something.

You should also make sure the setting at the bottom of that same screen is at 100% for "use at most [] % CPU time".

You will need to click the OK box at the bottom of the screen before any changes are made and they may not go to any other pc's if you have any.

There are a couple of other tweaks I also do if you are interested.

Hi there, thank you very much!
I set up all project settings like:
Use cpu even when used (the magic zero as you mentioned).
Use 100% of cpu's (for multicore)
Use 100% cpu (each core) ...and so on.

Therefore I am intrested in your tweaks :)


best wishes


edit: Other projects (einstein, poem, ...) are using 100% of each cpu thread...

Hi Bruce,

I've seen this kind of behavior before on the n-body (mt) (multi-thread) WU's. They reserve all available threads but only use 70-80% of available resources, even if you select 100% of CPU's and 100% of CPU time. It happened to me all the time on my 16 thread computer.

Hope that helps.

Hi there, thank you very much!
I set up all project settings like:
Use cpu even when used (the magic zero as you mentioned).
Use 100% of cpu's (for multicore)
Use 100% cpu (each core) ...and so on.

Therefore I am intrested in your tweaks :)


best wishes


edit: Other projects (einstein, poem, ...) are using 100% of each cpu thread...

As captainjack said sometimes no matter what you do you just can't overcome the projects programmers.

But here are my other tweaks...go back into the Boinc Manager and then Tools, computing preferences, then on processor page change the time to 90 minutes to switch between applications. This can be adjusted by you so that there is enough time to finish one unit but not get too far into the next unit before it switches, this helps when you have multiple projects to keep each project crunching smoothly. It isn't perfect though.

Next go the disk and memory usage page, change the 60 in the "tasks checkpoint to disk every" to 900. This changes it from every 60 seconds, i minute, to every 900 seconds or 15 minutes. As long as your pc's aren't crashing all the time this can save the hard drive from constantly being written too. This can help the older ssd drives especially as they all have limited total writes, the newer ones just have HUGE numbers before they die.

Then go into the memory usage section of that same page and adjust the bottom two boxes on the page. I do not use my pc's very much, they just crunch, so I put 75% in the "while pc is in use" box and 90% in the "while pc is idle" box.

And lastly I check the box at the bottom of that page telling Boinc to leave tasks in memory, this especially helps when you have plenty of ram and are crunching for multiple projects. The units in memory come back on quicker when they are swapped back and forth, otherwise they are saved on the hard drive which can be slow and in some cases problematic.

There is one other setting I adjust because I also crunch with gpu's and that is back on the processor usage page...I adjust the setting for "on multiprocessor systems, use at most" I change that to 99% if it is in a dual core system and to 75% on a quad core system. This reserves one cpu core for the gpu to use while crunching, which is up to 10 times faster then cpu crunching in most cases. Keeping the gpu fed and working optimally is crucial to making gpu's work.

There is one last setting I do not use, but you might if you are a gamer or need to use a program that needs to be done regardless of Boinc, and that is on the last tab, exclusive applications. That is where you can add a program, such as a gaming or office one, and Boinc will stop running while that program is running, giving you faster and exclusive access to all the power of the pc. After that program closes Boinc will pick right up where it left off and happily crunch again.

We can discuss app_info.xml and cc_config.xml files another time as they are primarily helpful when using a gpu.

gonna get a look :)

tyvm :D

gonna get a look :)

tyvm :D

No problem.

Grab yourself a copy of Process Explorer and watch the utilisation of each thread in real time.

Hi Richard,

I tool a look with the process explorerand it saids the same
like my widget (ob2k CPU Usage).
Thats a great tool, because I am able to check the loads/thread.
Due to checking that I recognized that the milkyway WUs doesn't get queued due to other processes, they are really doesn't use the full cores :(

Is there a possability to use costom settings with a *.xml file? If yes, how can I get it running (already tried out app_config.xml in project files without effect -.-).

Thank you for you help, there seems to be a very kind community for crunching people ;)


Greetz,

Bruce