Rosetta won't use 2nd cpu

Message boards : Number crunching : Rosetta won't use 2nd cpu

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Jack

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Message 80734 - Posted: 12 Oct 2016, 17:24:40 UTC

I have a dual processor system running Linux Mint 17.1. When there are only Rosetta tasks available in BOINC (7.2.42) only one task will run at a time. One task may show "Running" while the another shows "waiting to run". If there are tasks from other projects (Climate or Einstein) they will run along with a Rosetta task. So it seems when Rosetta is due a large share of the cpu time, it will only use half of what is available and the other cpu is wasted.
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Profile Dr. Merkwürdigliebe
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Message 80735 - Posted: 12 Oct 2016, 17:36:38 UTC

You have a dual-core system? Not enough memory? You barely have 2 GB...
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Message 80736 - Posted: 12 Oct 2016, 20:13:27 UTC

Default BOINC Manager settings use only a conservative portion of the memory on the machine. If you want it to run more aggressively, you will have to increase the memory it can use in the preferences. Tasks from other projects often require less memory to run, and so BOINC Manager can run both when other tasks are available.
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Message 80740 - Posted: 14 Oct 2016, 0:33:43 UTC - in response to Message 80736.  

Default BOINC Manager settings use only a conservative portion of the memory on the machine. If you want it to run more aggressively, you will have to increase the memory it can use in the preferences. Tasks from other projects often require less memory to run, and so BOINC Manager can run both when other tasks are available.

All true, but can I also mention that some individual tasks are using huge amounts of RAM recently. On the machine I'm currently using, 3 of the tasks are using ~225Mb while the 4th is using 1.1Gb. I've seen this on other machines. Some using 900Mb, the highest being 1.4Gb. I haven't linked to any particular type of task but it's definitely happening. On a machine with 2Gb RAM it would get wiped out - may even never run, I'm guessing.
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Jack

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Message 80741 - Posted: 14 Oct 2016, 2:06:47 UTC

Memory restriction was the problem. In Preferences, Memory usage when in use was set at 50%. I raised it to 75% and both tasks are running. Odd that the Memory use when idle was set at 90% but it appeared that only one task would run at a time then too. I have a big paging space, so large tasks should be able to run simultaneously, just a bit slower, unless for some reason they demand a large allocation of resident memory.
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Message 80762 - Posted: 20 Oct 2016, 9:18:19 UTC
Last modified: 20 Oct 2016, 9:32:16 UTC

for some reason i noted that boinc don't touch swap, and it isn't limited to r@h , i'm in another project which takes huge amount of memory due to virtualbox usage. i've plenty of swap but the sessions are limited to whatever ram memory i've. some users in another forum replied that boinc limits itself to ram in part as the computational loads is cpu intensive, it doesn't make sense to have those jobs sleep in swap, it is probably better to run less jobs save ram & power, and returns the results earlier

actually with SSD this is no longer true, swap to ssd is possibly much faster. but linux to date doesn't seem to have a way to treat ssd swap as 'memory'. that'd actually partially solve the problem. e.g. for now there don't seem to be a way to tell the kernel this is ssd swap & that is plain old harddrive swap which is *much* slower
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Message 80800 - Posted: 29 Oct 2016, 3:40:28 UTC - in response to Message 80762.  

Any chance these problems are related to the recent kernel updates? Just upgraded to the new Ubuntu, and it seems much worse than before. I think I'm not at your level of technical sophistication with Linux, but I'm pretty sure the problems are memory related.

In the prior release, the problems were less severe and I could "fix" things by nuking a few unneeded processes, but in the new release my favorite targets for nuking are much smaller. So far I haven't found any workaround... I could start a more specific thread, but I also suspect it's BOINC-level, not Rosetta-level and they don't care that much anyway.

Maybe the most helpful response would be a URL for a BOINC-level discussion of Linux-specific problems?
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Message boards : Number crunching : Rosetta won't use 2nd cpu



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