I tried the new feature in Bionc of limiting application CPU.
Thats because I wanted to stop the heat from CPU forcing the fans to spin up too much.

However, my experience has not been particularly smooth.
Previously, I limited BOINC to 1 CPU to achieve a similar effect.
I tried letting it have 70% of 2 CPU's.

However since making that change, most of my applications have become unstable.
That includes rosetta, einstein and wcg.
They tend to fall over regularly reporting something like

Wed Feb 7 20:15:50 2007|rosetta@home|Task 1a32__BOINC_GENERIC_RAMA_ABRELAX_frags83__1543_1157_0 exited with zero status but no 'finished' file
Wed Feb 7 20:15:50 2007|rosetta@home|If this happens repeatedly you may need to reset the project.

Since, its not just one application, it appears to be a generic issue.

So, its back to one CPU for me.

One more detail. On first glance, this doesnt appear to be that big a deal.
The application, picks itself up and continues.
But since its frequently going back to the last checkpoint, this represents a fair waste of CPU.

And WCG (faah subproject) is particularly badly hit.
Their checkpointing doesnt appear to work right.
So if eventually fills up its available diskspace with new checkpoint files.

I'm running on a macbook pro (core 2 duo) with MacOSX 10.4.8

Hmmmm.....

For heat reasons I just started running using the CPU throttle again.

I'm not seeing those messages at all (and I don't think I ever have and I used the throttle when it was really broken).

You get those messages when BOINC loses contact with the science app.


One of the reasons that's frequently cited for the problem is time synching. I don't know if Macs time synch the same way Windows does tho....


Have you tried an old fashioned reboot (yeah I know... typical Windows advice from a typical Windows user, but I've seen stranger things happen on all OS varieties)?

One thing to make sure is that you have your general preferences set to leave apps in memory. That should help eliminate some (if not most) of the fall back. I know Rosetta can take an eternity to checkpoint just because of the way their science app works. I'm not as familiar with WCG as I've only run a few of their WUs (they were RAM hogs). Einstein shouldn't lose too much time as it checkpoints quite regularly and frequently.

Wiki link for reference

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Kathryn :o)

Well, it may be stable with the limit CPU feature on windows.
But its certainly not on mac.

And yes, I do have leave applications in memory set.