Nathan, I think it'd be safe to remove _any_ of the "common" apps from the list, simply because if this was a Word problem, at least half of the Duals would be showing it. While there's a lot of PCs out there that are "crunchers only", I haven't heard of many Macs that are that way. Paul Buck, for example, has a moderate "farm" of systems, dual Xeons and such. But the G5 dual is the one he uses for everything "day to day". My Macs are definitely running Word, Excel, Photoshop, iEverything... although I don't have a dual at the moment.

I'd bet it's something happening down at the kernal level. It wouldn't surprise me for MS to do just about anything, but I can't see any need for Word to mess around that low.

I'm thinking it has to be something "odd"; something like Journaling on HFS that for a while was "server only", but _could_ be enabled on any Mac. (Obviously not that, as it's "on" now by default in 10.4, but something similar.) Is there anything you're running utility-wise that might enable something like this? Something along the lines of Cocktail, Kaleidoscope, FontJuggler, MenuMeters... Looking at Activity Monitor just now on mine, I see things I completely forgot were there, or didn't expect to see; Disk Warrior, Dashboard junk, Temperature Monitor Lite... Or possibly you have Web Sharing turned on... just tossing out anything I can think of.

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Not Messenger. The unusual items in my login items are the LCCDaemon for my logitech MX1000 and the MS Office Database daemon and the AU (Auto Update) Daemon. I've removed the Database daemon from the startup ...

I don't run any other office apps with any regularity. Firefox, some Terminal sessions ... RDC I do run every day, but I see the behavior with or without it.

I just saw the behavior now before *any* of the Dashboard (beyond the dasher daemon) stuff had a chance to load ...

Here's the list of stuff I have (ignoring the Activity Monitor itself and all of the dashboard stuff):

313 Firefox eric 0.20 3 47.81 MB 406.25 MB
304 boinc eric 0.00 1 2.14 MB 28.00 MB
283 Logitech Control Center Daemon eric 0.00 2 5.58 MB 344.64 MB
282 BOINCManager eric 0.00 1 14.82 MB 368.77 MB
279 Microsoft AU Daemon eric 0.00 1 1.88 MB 337.40 MB
277 Dasher Daemon eric 0.00 1 2.57 MB 342.02 MB
275 iTunes Helper eric 0.00 1 1.68 MB 337.12 MB
272 Finder eric 0.00 3 8.52 MB 362.61 MB
270 SystemUIServer eric 0.00 2 5.95 MB 357.05 MB
269 Dock eric 0.00 3 6.57 MB 355.77 MB
264 pbs eric 0.00 2 1.93 MB 54.25 MB
230 ARDAgent eric 0.00 8 2.29 MB 326.29 MB
76 loginwindow eric 0.00 3 4.18 MB 330.22 MB
75 ATSServer eric 0.00 2 3.86 MB 89.93 MB

ARD Agent, btw, is Apple's remote control thing (basically, rebranded VNC). Nathan - any ideas?

FWIW, this is now "bug # 457" in the BOINCzilla bugs database. I've been unable to contact the Mac developer any other way, but the database is back up, so I at least put it in there with a pointer back to this thread and the one on the SETI boards.

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I did a clean boot of my work machine and left it processing Einstein@Home units and nothing else while over the Xmas holidays and it reproduced. I never once ran anything else. The startup items: Console, Terminal, Kerberos, MicrosoftKeyboardHelper, iChat, iTunesHelper, BOINCManager. I sit behind a firewall and thus use the HTTP Proxy.

It's a dual-display machine, that is set to use the BOINCSaver (though starting "never", there's a hotcorner that will launch the saver), the display is set to sleep in 30m, and a password is required to wake the computer from sleep or screen saver.

I can produce a System Profiler report, if that is worthwhile, but it's pretty big to post in one of these messages.

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ARD Agent, btw, is Apple's remote control thing (basically, rebranded VNC). Nathan - any ideas?

I, too, am running the ARDAgent and AppleVNCServer, FWIW.

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I, too, am running the ARDAgent and AppleVNCServer, FWIW.

It doesn't seem logical that this could be it, but I would guess that very few people run that, and both of you do...

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I have a G4 laptop running ARDAgent and BOINC and it doesn't get the error.

I turned off the ARDAgent and still got the message. But I don't have the chance to reboot right now.

It's my first week back from a two week vacation - hopefully I'll get a chance to play with this before the weekend ...

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I'm having the same issue.

iMac 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo
1 GB RAM
Mac OS X 10.4.7
BOINC Manager 5.4.9

Occurs with both SETI@Home and Einstein@Home. Recent example:

Mon Sep 18 03:43:11 2006||Rescheduling CPU: files downloaded
Mon Sep 18 03:43:11 2006|SETI@home|Can't create shared memory: system shmget
Mon Sep 18 03:43:11 2006|SETI@home|Unrecoverable error for result 14my06aa.7267.21280.384654.3.189_3 (Couldn't start or resume: -144)
Mon Sep 18 03:43:11 2006||Rescheduling CPU: start failed
Mon Sep 18 03:43:11 2006|SETI@home|Unexpected state 7 for task 14my06aa.7267.21280.384654.3.189_3
Mon Sep 18 03:43:12 2006|SETI@home|Computation for task 14my06aa.7267.21280.384654.3.189_3 finished

Guys, you might want to take a look at the shmem story in the Error msg when running on Mac Pirates ship thread.

Hope this helps
Peter

I've been running BOINC on a couple of G4s and a G5 for a long time without any problem. But I just got a Mac Pro and this bug has bitten me. The error messages about shared memory occur repeatedly, but the workunits seem to run to completion.

Initially, I had Rosetta and Einstein attached on that computer. After reading about this problem, I tried detaching from Rosetta so that only one project was attached, but the error messages continued.

I tried the modifications to the shared memory configuration suggested in the Pirates thread. The error messages disappeared but Parallels no longer works. In fact, Parallels crashes the kernel.

I deleted the shared memory configuration changes, and the error messages returned.

Deleting the BOINC application and the data folder and then reinstalling brought no joy.

I haven't tried changing the leave-app-in-memory setting yet.

I tried changing the leave-app-in-memory setting to NO, but that didn't help.

And now another machine has developed the problem. A new iMac which had been crunching Rosetta and Einstein for a couple of weeks suddenly developed the shared memory problem. It quickly errored out a few dozen workunits and hit the daily limit in both projects yesterday.

An identically configured iMac sitting next to that one is still crunching without problems.

I checked out the thread on the Pirates@Home board. I've already had the leave-app-in-memory setting as No. I've increased my System V shared memory cap from 4MB to 16MB, so at least it will take four times as long to leak enough memory to cause the turbo-failure.

Any other clues? Anything a developer (who is restricted from reading open source code) can do in the debugger to track this down? (Like a trace mode on shmXXX apis that is enabled by setting or environment variable?)

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I checked out the thread on the Pirates@Home board. I've already had the leave-app-in-memory setting as No. I've increased my System V shared memory cap from 4MB to 16MB, so at least it will take four times as long to leak enough memory to cause the turbo-failure.

FWIW the shared-memory fix described on the Spyhill site worked for me when I got a rash of the shmget errors this fall. This dual-core G5 is attached to six projects (although I don't think it's had active tasks from more than five at a time), and is hardly ever rebooted -- maybe twice since the end of September. I have (and always have had) the leave-in-memory preference set to Yes.

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