I'm am brand new here, so advice from long time users is probably more pertinent. On my Linux box I am running 2 project. Rosetta was not switching back and forth gracefully. It seemed to hang as you are describing. I found a hint here somewhere that recommended setting the "Leave in memory" setting to YES.

FWIW,

Gene

...when it's about 20% done with a rosetta unit, my cpu stops runing at 100% and goes back down to normal levels...

for a few seconds? a few minutes? half an hour? or stays like that till the end of the job?

If it is just for a few minutes, this is what I think is happening, and I've seen it on my slow Linux box too. If it never recovers, then after maybe an hour I'd be feeling like aborting that WU and trying my luck with another.

If I am right about what is happening, the short answer is that there is nothing you can do about it. Now for the long answer:


What happens at each of the 'round number' steps in Rosetta's progress is that it is changing from analysing one part of the job to go on to do the next. It is almost like starting Rosetta again. It will be calling on parts of the program that have not been used since startup, or since the start of the previous stage. These may have been swapped out of RAM into virtual memory. (Cunningly, they don't go into the swap file, program code is 'swapped' using it's original DLL file, as the code cannot have changed).

In addition, Rosetta may need new data from the data files. These may be in the cache, but if these parts of the file have not been accessed before are more likely still onthe hard disk. These have to be read.

All of this means that Rosetta is waiting for the virtual memory manager and the disk cache manager to figure out what to do, and then waiting for the hard disk to actually do it. While the process is disk-limited the CPU usage drops to normal levels as you have observed.

River~~

edit: PS, welcome to Rosetta and congrats on getting your first few credits!