In the interests of prolonging the life of my cpu, I would like to limit the amount of cpu BOINC uses to less than 90%. Is such possible?

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In the interests of prolonging the life of my cpu, I would like to limit the amount of cpu BOINC uses to less than 90%. Is such possible?

There's an option in new BOINC client under development that can do this, but I don't know when it'll be released.

In the mean time, you could try something like http://threadmaster.tripod.com/

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Also take a look at the temperature of your CPU. A hot but idle CPU will die quicker than a cool, busy one...

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You can find info on using ThreadMaster (http://threadmaster.tripod.com/)

here1 and here2 (from Einstein boards)

(works under XP also, although it doesn't mention it specifically)

For Linux, you can use cpulimit

PS: CPU utilisation (70% or 100%) doesn't tell you very much about CPU life. The things which matter are temperature and rate-of-change of it.

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BoincStudio contains special version of Boinc, that can limit cpu usage. After installing you have to change the cpu_usage_limit setting in the bs_opts.xml file. Just replace the number in the line containing:

<cpu_usage_limit>-1.00</cpu_usage_limit>

with number between 0.00 and 1.00 . For example if you want 90%, you would use:

<cpu_usage_limit>0.90</cpu_usage_limit>

In the interests of prolonging the life of my cpu, I would like to limit the amount of cpu BOINC uses to less than 90%. Is such possible?

I currently use ThreadMaster to limit my CPU. ThreadMaster can be confusing. If you need to use ThreadMaster I will attempt to help you.

Jack

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I noticed there's a new option in general preferences (when accessing general preferences via rosetta website. SIMAP for example doesn't have this option):

Use at most ??? percent of CPU time


For how long has it been there? I haven't seen any posts here about this.

Doesn't seem to do anything yet. I changed it to 50 percent and updated boinc manager. Nothing happened so I swithed it back to 100 percent.

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list of my results

...new option in general preferences

Use at most ??? percent of CPU time

Right, BOINC is working on some changes to allow such a feature. I'm thinking they had to allow access to the option before releasing the code that uses it so that beta testers could set it up and attempt to use it.

Coming soon in a new BOINC version.

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Thanks. Yeah, I read someplace that versio 5.6 ?? would have this option.

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list of my results

Yes, I think that's right.

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Thanks. Yeah, I read someplace that versio 5.6 ?? would have this option.

It is already being tested in 5.5.x (development builds) - so far, that portion seems to work OK. It is always done as multiples of a second. For example, 0.90 would be 9 seconds on and 1 second off. 0.50 would be one second on and one second off. An early bug caused it to default to 0.01 or one second on followed by 99 seconds off - I would not recommend this setting.

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It's 30C in my office right now. My temperature alert program started beeping. I know the fins on the heat sink are clean because I only cleaned then a week or so back.

I took the side off the machine, that dropped the CPU from 70C to 64-65C. I obviously need more air movement in there.

It is this machine. I know Prescotts are designed to run hot but it does concern me. My Northwood machines are fine.

It runs hottest if both virtual CPU's are running SIMAP.

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It's 30C in my office right now. My temperature alert program started beeping. I know the fins on the heat sink are clean because I only cleaned then a week or so back.

I took the side off the machine, that dropped the CPU from 70C to 64-65C. I obviously need more air movement in there.

It is this machine. I know Prescotts are designed to run hot but it does concern me. My Northwood machines are fine.

It runs hottest if both virtual CPU's are running SIMAP.

I had the same problem when I upgraded to a P4 3.2 gig rig last year. Taking the side panel off helps, but the best solution until the temperature goes down is to keep your CPU setting preference at 1: doing two at a time sounds great, but the benefits are marginal, and lots more heat when you might not have that much room to spare in the CPU temp department. If your beeps are going off, you might want to start thinking about the life of your PC: Beeps are not a good thing here.

Gerry

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Thanks. Yeah, I read someplace that versio 5.6 ?? would have this option.

It is already being tested in 5.5.x (development builds) - so far, that portion seems to work OK. It is always done as multiples of a second. For example, 0.90 would be 9 seconds on and 1 second off. 0.50 would be one second on and one second off. An early bug caused it to default to 0.01 or one second on followed by 99 seconds off - I would not recommend this setting.

Would that kill off a Rosetta Job if it restarted too many times, or does'nt it work like that ?

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Would that kill of a Rosetta Job if it restarted too many times or does'nt it work like that?

Well, I'm guessing this 1 second out of 10 delay will not be done as a restart. That would be a significant waste of resources getting reestablished. So it would be like keeping the program in memory and sending it the instruction to suspend, and then a second later telling it to execute again. So, that's not really a full restart of the WU, because it's already in memory and still has temporary data that has not been checkpointed.

If you actually remove from memory... and so a full "restart" is needed from the WU's last checkpoint... and this has happend from the SAME checkpoint (i.e. no new checkpoint has been reached) four times previously, then the watchdog kicks in and ends the WU, as the WU doesn't seem to be making any progress for some reason.

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I'd imagine this would need thorough testing at Ralph well before being released here, as I could see potential problems with the watchdog, checkpointing and settings in peoples preferences. I'm sure it will be Feet1st.

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I'd imagine this would need thorough testing at Ralph well before being released here

...well, we're talking about a BOINC change here. BOINC's job is to try to add new features in a mannar that is not disruptive to the projects. From the project point of view, I don't think they are going to refuse work requests from a newer BOINC release. So, to some extent they won't be aware of a BOINC client change. And Ralph can't really be changed to REQUIRE the beta BOINC release either, because they need to test new WUs too.

...but yes! If you are reading this and you are a BOINC beta tester, please signup on Ralph and see if you can get some WUs downloaded and tested. And post any apparent issues in the Ralph feedback thread, and point out your BOINC beta version in your post.

I'm sure that BakerLab gets new BOINC versions on their machines for testing as well.

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Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
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Yeah, I know it is a BOINC change. It would probably be tried out inhouse first (BOINC+ Rosetta),then any alterations to the Rosetta app would be made (if any were needed at all) then a thorough test on Ralph.

This is another reason I dont post here much BTW. A simple thing turns into a thousand paragraphs. Surely we can leave out all the obvious stuff.

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for all of you willing to limit CPU usage check this out http://mion.faireal.net/BES

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why doesn't boinc just integrate the threadmaster functionality? Going on and off constantly sounds somewhat stressful to the cpu.

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