I started noticing that the fans on my Powerbook G4, 1.67GHz were running all the time and eventually remembered to run 'Activity Monitor'. This revealed that BOINC was taking up almost all of the processor time. Restarting BOINC would correct the condition for a bit but, eventually, it would recur. I have downloaded version 5.10.45 to no avail. I suppose this must have been discussed in this forum before, but I can't find anything, (which is possibly because I can't think of the right search).

Does anyone have any thoughts?


Steve

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I started noticing that the fans on my Powerbook G4, 1.67GHz were running all the time and eventually remembered to run 'Activity Monitor'. This revealed that BOINC was taking up almost all of the processor time.

That’s quite normal: BOINC is designed to use as much of possible of the CPU’s idle time, keeping it near 100%. (Note that the science apps’ processes are “nice”, coloured blue on the CPU graph in Activity Monitor, which means they have lower priority than the others.) If you’re concerned about overheating or excessive wear on the cooling system, you might want to try the throttling feature in your preferences: dropping the CPU usage to 80% or 90% (which will make BOINC pause for one second in every five or ten respectively) can make a big difference.

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I started noticing that the fans on my Powerbook G4, 1.67GHz were running all the time and eventually remembered to run 'Activity Monitor'. This revealed that BOINC was taking up almost all of the processor time.

That’s quite normal: BOINC is designed to use as much of possible of the CPU’s idle time, keeping it near 100%. (Note that the science apps’ processes are “nice”, coloured blue on the CPU graph in Activity Monitor, which means they have lower priority than the others.) If you’re concerned about overheating or excessive wear on the cooling system, you might want to try the throttling feature in your preferences: dropping the CPU usage to 80% or 90% (which will make BOINC pause for one second in every five or ten respectively) can make a big difference.

Yes, I knew about throttling, indeed I have that preference set to 10% for the time being. (Nothing happens very fast, but I can see better if something's the matter.) The trouble is that BOINC, (well not BOINC, actually, setiathome_5_2), is at the moment showing a consistent usage of about 85%.... Now that I've restarted BOINC, the pattern is much more as expected: setathome coming to the top of the usage list every so often. And the processor is also a lot cooler now.

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Yes, I knew about throttling, indeed I have that preference set to 10% for the time being. (Nothing happens very fast, but I can see better if something's the matter.) The trouble is that BOINC, (well not BOINC, actually, setiathome_5_2), is at the moment showing a consistent usage of about 85%.... Now that I've restarted BOINC, the pattern is much more as expected: setathome coming to the top of the usage list every so often. And the processor is also a lot cooler now.

I'm having somewhat similar issues. BOINC recently decided (seemingly out of nowhere) to disregard preferences to not run when user is active... I've verified preferences from both Web and local preferences... Trying to have one take control. What's odd is everything else seems to be "respected". Just won't pause unless I go and manually do so. Any thoughts? I've tried reinstalling. Perhaps I need to delete something* that may have become corrupt?

Thanks in advance!

-Will

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My cpu throttling in Leopard seems to have a mind of its own too... If I set it at 50% or above it seems to stay fairly stable, but if I set it below 50% it seems to fluctuate every other second, and if I set it really low like at 10% it seems to take on a mind of its own... Personally, I think it has more to do with Leopard than with boinc... ;)

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It may not be 1984 but George Orwell sure did see the future . . .

Much as I want to support SETI, I don't want to run the software while there appears to be this problem: especially as it seems I'm not the only one suffering it. The prodigous amount of heat produced when BOINC 'takes over' the processor cannot be good for my laptop's battery - not to mention the ability of other programs to do anything useful.

Until someone, (presumably within The Project), can come up with a solution, I am, regretfully, going suspend my contribution.

Steve.

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