boinc is only using 20% of the cpu at any time. shouldn't it use more than that? I think it's using the GPU like it properly should.

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=8600

7.6.6 64-bit, user install
i7 4790 cpu, 8gb ram, gtx 750
64-bit Win 8.1
seti@home
hostID? I don't know where to find it. is it computer ID? If so, 7739291

This PC has many problems, but I don't think they'd affect boinc

I have it set at 100% CPUs & 100% CPU time

8/24/2015 6:32:15 PM | | Resuming computation
8/24/2015 6:35:29 PM | SETI@home | Computation for task 05mr11aa.6810.15609.438086664205.12.88_0 finished
8/24/2015 6:35:29 PM | SETI@home | Starting task 09my11ab.14477.31885.438086664205.12.197_0
8/24/2015 6:35:31 PM | SETI@home | Started upload of 05mr11aa.6810.15609.438086664205.12.88_0_0
8/24/2015 6:35:37 PM | SETI@home | Finished upload of 05mr11aa.6810.15609.438086664205.12.88_0_0
8/24/2015 6:35:46 PM | | Suspending computation - CPU is busy
8/24/2015 6:35:56 PM | | Resuming computation
8/24/2015 6:37:06 PM | | Suspending computation - CPU is busy
8/24/2015 6:37:16 PM | | Resuming computation
8/24/2015 6:47:18 PM | | Suspending computation - CPU is busy
8/24/2015 6:47:28 PM | | Resuming computation
8/24/2015 6:52:28 PM | | Suspending computation - CPU is busy
8/24/2015 6:52:38 PM | | Resuming computation
8/24/2015 6:57:19 PM | | Suspending computation - CPU is busy
8/24/2015 6:57:29 PM | | Resuming computation
8/24/2015 6:59:19 PM | SETI@home | Computation for task 09my11ab.14477.31885.438086664205.12.197_0 finished
8/24/2015 6:59:19 PM | SETI@home | Starting task 14oc11ag.28789.15609.438086664195.12.30_0
8/24/2015 6:59:21 PM | SETI@home | Started upload of 09my11ab.14477.31885.438086664205.12.197_0_0
8/24/2015 6:59:25 PM | SETI@home | Finished upload of 09my11ab.14477.31885.438086664205.12.197_0_0
8/24/2015 7:07:30 PM | | Suspending computation - CPU is busy
8/24/2015 7:07:40 PM | | Resuming computation
8/24/2015 7:14:26 PM | SETI@home | Computation for task 14oc11ag.28789.15609.438086664195.12.30_0 finished
8/24/2015 7:14:27 PM | SETI@home | Starting task 11ja11ac.32306.3753.438086664199.12.186_1
8/24/2015 7:14:28 PM | SETI@home | Started upload of 14oc11ag.28789.15609.438086664195.12.30_0_0
8/24/2015 7:14:30 PM | SETI@home | Finished upload of 14oc11ag.28789.15609.438086664195.12.30_0_0
8/24/2015 7:29:35 PM | SETI@home | Sending scheduler request: To report completed tasks.
8/24/2015 7:29:35 PM | SETI@home | Reporting 4 completed tasks
8/24/2015 7:29:35 PM | SETI@home | Requesting new tasks for CPU and NVIDIA GPU
8/24/2015 7:29:36 PM | SETI@home | Scheduler request completed: got 4 new tasks
8/24/2015 7:29:38 PM | SETI@home | Started download of 21no11ab.4276.17331.438086664197.12.210

But what did you set for:

Suspend when non-BOINC CPU usage is above X %


Change that to something higher and see if your system stops suspending work due to the CPU being busy. I would set it to 0 which turns the feature off and see if the CPU usage goes up.

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Ok, just tried that. It didn't work.

Ok, just tried that. It didn't work.

If you click on Activity at the top and select Run Always (instead of Run based on preferences), does the CPU usage go up at all?

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It doesn't. Never seems to use more than 23%. About 2% per thread (one task per thread, not counting the GPU), give or take.

It doesn't. Never seems to use more than 23%. About 2% per thread (one task per thread, not counting the GPU), give or take.

I haven't moved up to v. 7.6.6 yet (my highest is 7.6.2). My suggestion would be to try an older stable release and see if it does the same thing. If it fixes it, there may be a bug somewhere that needs looked into. If it doesn't fix it, then we are back to square one. After looking at BOINC version, my next suggestion would be to see if it happens at another project or look and see if something got changed in Windows...

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Sorry if asking things you already know, but we don't have all info to make an assessment, all rather puzzling without having a full picture. As noted, if Run Always is set in the Activity menu, for CPU and GPU, most of the processor load limiting preferences are ignored and CPU tasks will take all 'spare' there is to have. Rather than setting the "While processor use ...", to 100, enter 0 which will give it max, no more CPU busy control.

Start your task manager, make sure the CPU load and Time are in view, then hit the show processes for all users button and sort view on highest to lowest load and highest to lowest cpu time used [shows which process(es) accumulate most. Since BOINC science apps run at lowest priority, they yield to practically anything. Are there other processes using large amounts of time? Is the system Idle process getting the most? svchost.exe I often find eating lots of CPU time on W8. I then just kill those as most of the time they're then runaway wasting time. Why would svchost need 100% to manage for instance the wifi?

As for the cc_config and app_config, what is in there? If GPGPU tasks were configured to use n% of a processor, but the GPGPU tasks really only use a fraction of the CPU, the rest will go idle if there is no spare allocation left for CPU tasks to use this.

To understand your setup, really like to see the startup event log, 50 lines.

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Coelum Non Animum Mutant, Qui Trans Mare Currunt

after the 20% or so used by boinc/seti@home, the other 80% of the processor cores are doing nothing. each core is only using 2% of what it can for each seti@home task. Plus a ninth task for the GPU. There are no problems with other apps/programs/etc. using the cores. Nothing else is active, except maybe firefox at 2% processor use. Each seti@home_v7 is only using about 2.5%

I can't find cc_config, app_config, GPGPU tasks


8/29/2015 5:51:45 PM | | cc_config.xml not found - using defaults
8/29/2015 5:51:45 PM | | Starting BOINC client version 7.6.6 for windows_x86_64
8/29/2015 5:51:45 PM | | log flags: file_xfer, sched_ops, task
8/29/2015 5:51:45 PM | | Libraries: libcurl/7.39.0 OpenSSL/1.0.2a zlib/1.2.8
8/29/2015 5:51:45 PM | | Data directory: C:\ProgramData\BOINC
8/29/2015 5:51:45 PM | | Running under account user
8/29/2015 5:51:48 PM | | CUDA: NVIDIA GPU 0: GeForce GTX 750 (driver version 353.62, CUDA version 7.5, compute capability 5.0, 2048MB, 1652MB available, 1352 GFLOPS peak)
8/29/2015 5:51:48 PM | | OpenCL: NVIDIA GPU 0: GeForce GTX 750 (driver version 353.62, device version OpenCL 1.2 CUDA, 2048MB, 1652MB available, 1352 GFLOPS peak)
8/29/2015 5:51:48 PM | | Host name: cyber
8/29/2015 5:51:48 PM | | Processor: 8 GenuineIntel Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4790 CPU @ 3.60GHz [Family 6 Model 60 Stepping 3]
8/29/2015 5:51:48 PM | | Processor features: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss htt tm pni ssse3 fma cx16 sse4_1 sse4_2 movebe popcnt aes f16c rdrandsyscall nx lm avx avx2 vmx smx tm2 pbe fsgsbase bmi1 smep bmi2
8/29/2015 5:51:48 PM | | OS: Microsoft Windows 8.1: Professional x64 Edition, (06.03.9600.00)
8/29/2015 5:51:48 PM | | Memory: 7.95 GB physical, 15.95 GB virtual
8/29/2015 5:51:48 PM | | Disk: 931.17 GB total, 497.21 GB free
8/29/2015 5:51:48 PM | | Local time is UTC -4 hours
8/29/2015 5:51:48 PM | | VirtualBox version: 4.3.12
8/29/2015 5:51:48 PM | SETI@home | URL http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/; Computer ID 7739291; resource share 50
8/29/2015 5:51:48 PM | SETI@home | General prefs: from SETI@home (last modified 03-May-2005 04:21:30)
8/29/2015 5:51:48 PM | SETI@home | Computer location: home
8/29/2015 5:51:48 PM | SETI@home | General prefs: no separate prefs for home; using your defaults
8/29/2015 5:51:48 PM | | Reading preferences override file
8/29/2015 5:51:48 PM | | Preferences:
8/29/2015 5:51:48 PM | | max memory usage when active: 4069.84MB
8/29/2015 5:51:48 PM | | max memory usage when idle: 7325.72MB
8/29/2015 5:51:48 PM | | max disk usage: 100.00GB
8/29/2015 5:51:48 PM | | (to change preferences, visit a project web site or select Preferences in the Manager)
8/29/2015 5:51:48 PM | | Not using a proxy

Tasks being calculated on the GPU at Seti like to have at least one CPU core free for doing work on that GPU. It's possible that you're seeing the system slightly overworked due to running tasks on all 8 cores. You can try this by setting Use at most N% of the CPUs to 90% (since this value is an integer, anything above 87 and below 100 will set BOINC to use 7 CPU cores).

But checking your tasks, I don't see any weird values in run time.

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Use at most N% of the CPUs set to 90% only dropped the number of tasks from 9 to 8. It still won't use more than 20-25% or so. I don't think anything is overworked. It's more like under-worked...? I don't know why.

Use at most N% of the CPUs set to 90% only dropped the number of tasks from 9 to 8. It still won't use more than 20-25% or so. I don't think anything is overworked. It's more like under-worked...? I don't know why.

Sounds like an OS side scheduling problem, rather than a Boinc problem, If Boinc starts 7 or 8 CPU tasks, the OS should schedule them across the available CPU cores.

Claggy

This is confusing. I'm starting to wonder if it's running them all on the same core...? the "processes" and "details" tabs of the task manager are painting different pictures. One claims 20% CPU use (processes) while the other claims near 100% (details) What could I try now?

What could I try now?

Try... Process Explorer: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

What does it tell?

What CPU affinity the processes have?

Process explorer says the CPU is being used 100%... approximately 10% per seti@home task. I don't know why the processes tab of task manager only says 20% total.

they're all set to all affinity

Maybe everything is fine. Maybe that task manager tab is just a liar.

It's not fine, CPU tasks run too long.

Check the processor's running frequency. Is it overheating?

Process explorer says the CPU is being used 100%...

If you open the View... System information... and check the "Show one graph per CPU", then it should display the loads for separate CPU cores or threads. If they all show load is almost 100% then the CPU woudn't be able to do much more.

Maybe everything is fine. Maybe that task manager tab is just a liar.

The Windows 10 task manager seems to have some issues... The "Processes" tab is the kind of behavior I'd expect to see from previous versions of Windows where you had a "Show processes for all users" button, but that feature seems to be lacking. The "Details" tab seems to show all users by default, but it's not in a very pretty format, unless you're used to the old Windows XP task manager.

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My Detailed BOINC Stats