Hi there,

I am running Seti@home with Boinc command line version on OS X 10.3.8. I had a problem with my CommuniGatePro mail server that stopped working after a while due to the consumption of processor time from Boinc.

I have seen that Boinc runs with 'nice' to run in the background only, but is there a way to run Boinc even 'nicer' for other applications?

Greetings,

Christian

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Programs not running as root can run with a 'niceness' value ranging from 0 to 20. The higher the value the nicer the program. SETI@home runs with a niceness value of 19, and I don't know if changing it to 20 would help much.

Anyway, if you think changing the niceness value of SETI to 20 might help, here's what to do:

1) Run `ps xa | grep seti` in a Terminal window to get the process ID for SETI. Running this on my machine gives me:

<PRE>17650 ?? RN 81:11.77 setiathome_4.02_powerpc-apple-darwin
17981 p2 R+ 0:00.00 grep seti</PRE>

In this case, SETI is running with process ID #17650.

2) Run `sudo renice 20 -p PID`, replacing PID with the process ID # obtained in step 1. For example, on my machine I'd run `sudo renice 20 -p 17650`. Enter password when prompted.

Obviously, this would need to be automated if you want to do it regularly. Try it manually a few times to see if changing the niceness value of SETI from 19 to 20 does any good. If not, then it's probably not worth automating.

Good luck!

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