Anyone else seen this? Started to happen a few months ago: sometimes (but not always) the seti@home application slows printing to a crawl: to get things to print I suspend the seti@home task using the BOINC Manager, and then resume the seti task once printing is finished.

But other things - word processing, web browsing, launching new programs - don't seem to be impacted by a running seti@home. Weird.

I upgraded to OS X 10.11.5 about 6 months ago, so this problem may be correlated with the OS upgrade. I am running the latest BOINC (7.6.22 with wxWidgets 3.0.0), and this is on a mid-2011 iMac with a AMD Radeon HD 6770M, 512 MB.

That has been a problem for a long time. SETI seems to hogg all the CPU cycles. I just hit the BOINC snooze button when I have to do something else with my Mac. It use to be SETI would stand bye when the computer had something else to do but not any more...

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Thanks. At least there is a simple workaround. Do you know if there is anywhere a formal 'bug' tracking tool / site for SETI@home or BOINC? Would be nice to have a proper place to track these things, and see if it's even being worked on / looked at ....

You're not running anything on your CPU, only on your GPU.

It's been known since the very beginning of GPU crunching that this slows down other things on your computer, including keyboard, mouse, screen-drawing, network, USB, Bluetooth, WIFI etc.

That's why the default setting for use of the GPU is when the computer is not in use. When you change that preference, or override it with the Activity menu, it's on your own.

@Ian, you also use the GPU. Try to work with the default preference setting for "Suspend GPU computing when computer is in use" set to enabled (checked). It's also a good idea to allow one CPU core to be free to handle the GPU and everything else on your system. Set "Use at most N % of the CPUs" to75%. On a quad core this will leave 3 cores used for crunching, the 4th one will be free.

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