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MarkJ
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Message 51849 - Posted: 18 Apr 2015, 2:41:43 UTC - in response to Message 51845.  

How does that work Mark? I and I suspect a lot of other crunchers have never used virtual boxes. What is the performance hit if any to crunching and other work particularly if running on minimum spec for memory?

You install VirtualBox on your machine. You can do that either via the BOINC+Vbox installer or do each individually. I prefer individually as there have been reports of the BOINC+Vbox installer failing on the Vbox part. Also you can usually get a more up to date Vbox directly from the source (virtualbox.org). The recent versions of BOINC will detect the presence of Vbox once its installed.

The project sends Vbox virtual disk images as work units. The disk image has whatever OS (usually a flavour of Linux) and everything else to run the task.

Overheads-wise they use more memory of course due to the Vbox memory footprint. The CPU usage would depend on the task but CPDN are single-threaded so I'd expect 1 CPU thread per work unit running.
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Jean-David Beyer

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Message 51872 - Posted: 23 Apr 2015, 1:08:59 UTC - in response to Message 51848.  

Why should running BOINC tasks that are severely compute-limited reduce the responsiveness of your system? Is it an OS problem? I ask because I run (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6) 64-bit system with 4 cores and 8 GBytes RAM. I tend to have three Climate Prediction models running all the time and setiathome, and WorldCommunityGrid running under BOINC as well, so the processor cores are completely saturated at all times. The BOINC tasks run at the lowest priority, so they run only when the processors have nothing else to do. And turning off the entire BOINC system does not make the other stuff run any faster.
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Profile Dave Jackson
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Message 51876 - Posted: 23 Apr 2015, 7:51:23 UTC

If it is still unresponsive when BOINC computation is stopped, try running top in a terminal to see if something else is hogging memory.

Two biggest culprits on my Kubuntu system are Firefox if several tabs open and I discovered by using top yesterday choqoq, my twitter client if it has been running in the background. I must look at it and see if there are some settings I can change to stop that.
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Eirik Redd

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Message 51877 - Posted: 23 Apr 2015, 10:23:20 UTC - in response to Message 51876.  

Oh yeah, for sure run top in a terminal. I've done that many times,
on Linux, with Firefox, it's almost always the "plugin-container" task that is hogging the system, not the cpdn tasks. Plugin-container won't be on the top of top, but somehow it clogs everything up. Find it, kill it.
I kill "plugin-container" in the "top" app -- several times per day. Just to get firefox responsive. Not a CPDN problem, a firefox and flash problem, I think.

But this is slightly off-topic.

If it is still unresponsive when BOINC computation is stopped, try running top in a terminal to see if something else is hogging memory.

Two biggest culprits on my Kubuntu system are Firefox if several tabs open and I discovered by using top yesterday choqoq, my twitter client if it has been running in the background. I must look at it and see if there are some settings I can change to stop that.


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Message 51878 - Posted: 23 Apr 2015, 10:34:57 UTC - in response to Message 51872.  

Running BOINC and CPDN last decade -
And sometimes having really bad response time with Firefox, and Chrome, and Links.
I've no clue about the interactions, but I don't think CPDN is the problem.
Any gurus out there?
I really don't think it's the CPDN tasks causing the problem

Why should running BOINC tasks that are severely compute-limited reduce the responsiveness of your system? Is it an OS problem? I ask because I run (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6) 64-bit system with 4 cores and 8 GBytes RAM. I tend to have three Climate Prediction models running all the time and setiathome, and WorldCommunityGrid running under BOINC as well, so the processor cores are completely saturated at all times. The BOINC tasks run at the lowest priority, so they run only when the processors have nothing else to do. And turning off the entire BOINC system does not make the other stuff run any faster.


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Jim1348

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Message 51880 - Posted: 23 Apr 2015, 14:43:39 UTC - in response to Message 51878.  
Last modified: 23 Apr 2015, 14:44:37 UTC

Running BOINC and CPDN last decade -
And sometimes having really bad response time with Firefox, and Chrome, and Links.

I run CPDN only on dedicated machines, and don't do desktop work there. But it is probably because you have run out of main memory, and the BOINC work is overflowing onto virtual memory on your disk drive. That will slow everything down a LOT. So run fewer BOINC tasks at once, or get more memory. DDR3 is relatively cheap at the moment, at least in the U.S.
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Message 51881 - Posted: 23 Apr 2015, 23:25:06 UTC

I have a couple of Fedora 16 64 bit systems. To start my BOINC sessions I would click on the "Files" icon to launch the files system, navigate to the BOINC folder and then start BOINC.
I would leave the "Files" open so I could easily go back to check things in BOINC or the Download folder or other files searches.

I found after doing this for a long time without a computer reboot (such as long running projects that restart from scratch if you start BOINC again), that my systems start to slow down and I start having memory issues.

The "Files" programme starts to use a lot of resources over time.

By closing it down when I am not using it (after I have done my file searches, started BOINC or installed some download), I found that the whole system came back to life and I got my memory back (the computers memory, not mine as that is already lost).

So an innocent programme could be causing you an issue.

Conan
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Message boards : Number crunching : Linux/Mac/Windows segmentation

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