I am running on XP 1.7GHz 256mb RAM. It seems, however, that my project is running a lot slower than it should be. It currently says 2552:08:44 left until completion. Am I doing something wrong? How do I get this to speed up? I have it set to run always and network always available.

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1) In your general prefs, set: Leave applications in memory while preempted? to Yes
2) Don\'t use the screen saver; it takes up cpu cycles. Set screensaver to \'blank\'.
Use the inbuilt graphics option when you want to see what is happening.
3) Get some more ram, so that your computer doesn\'t spend as much time swapping apps to hd. 512 is much better. And, if you can, get all new ram, going for the fastest you can find, rather than \'value\' ram.

And don\'t worry too much about how long BOINC thinks it will take. It\'s good with short, (a few hours), projects, but really bad with cpdn. But it will take months of 24/7 running at 1.7G

I\'m with Les. Get at least 256 MB more RAM. Then in General Preferences (from the \"Your account\" link on the left of the web page), make sure:

Do work while computer is in use? &
Leave applications in memory while preempted?

are set to YES (Update Preferences). Then update the project from the Projects tab of the BOINC GUI to make it take effect.

I have 4.096 gigs of the fastest DDR2 RAM there is, and am running a 3.2 gig P4D. According to the estimated time, it\'ll take months to finish. However, after 12 days of running I am at slightly over 20% completion.

Initially, I had problems with models crashing, but I was running the graphics too. Sincethen, I don\'t run the graphics and this seems to cure a pandemic problem.

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1) In your general prefs, set: Leave applications in memory while preempted? to Yes
2) Don\'t use the screen saver; it takes up cpu cycles. Set screensaver to \'blank\'.
Use the inbuilt graphics option when you want to see what is happening.
3) Get some more ram, so that your computer doesn\'t spend as much time swapping apps to hd. 512 is much better. And, if you can, get all new ram, going for the fastest you can find, rather than \'value\' ram.

And don\'t worry too much about how long BOINC thinks it will take. It\'s good with short, (a few hours), projects, but really bad with cpdn. But it will take months of 24/7 running at 1.7G

It just doesnt seem as if it\'s using all the CPU it can. There is plenty of \"idle\" CPU there.

I\'ll set my screensaver to blank, but Im pretty sure I\'ve done #1. Thanks for everyone\'s help!

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Do you have symptoms like described in the first post in this thread? If so, your hard disk light will be on a lot, and your CPU won\'t be at 100%.

It just doesnt seem as if it\'s using all the CPU it can. There is plenty of \"idle\" CPU there.

I\'ll set my screensaver to blank, but Im pretty sure I\'ve done #1. Thanks for everyone\'s help!

CPU is probably idle because of all the time spent waiting for stuff to go to and from disk due to your memory situation. 256 MB is simply not enough for CPDN (its very low for anything else too). You can buy an extra 512MB or 1GB memory very cheaply, it\'ll make your machine run far faster, both for CPDN and also for general use (using word, and so forth).

I have 4GB on mine (although thanks to Windows XP limitations I can only use 3), and everything runs well on the box.

Incidentally, this overuse of your disk is putting you in danger of a disk failure. How much irreplacable stuff do you have on there? Is it backed up?

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I have a machine with 256 MB and it\'s running fine (no swap, CPU at 100%)
A sulphur unit on a 1.7 Ghz machine is long: I think it\'s normal.
The only difference is that I use Linux, so it\'s less memory eating than XP.
Before buying memory sticks, I would look for a potential problem, because the CPU shoudn\'t be completly idle
I\'ve tested the CM yesterday on this machine, and it was working OK with 256 MB and XP: CPU at 100% and no swap.
Just my 2 cents.

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Arnaud

I have a machine with 256 MB and it\'s running fine (no swap, nothing)
A sulphur unit on a 1.7 Ghz machine is long: I think it\'s normal.
The only difference is that I have Linux, so it\'s less memory eating that XP.
Before buying memory sticks, I would look for a potential problem, because the CPU shoudn\'t be completly idle.
Just my 2 cents.

My XP Kernal memory usage is 280MB (although some of it can be paged out). So after he\'s loaded XP there\'s hardly any room for anything else... I personally wouldn\'t want to run XP with less than 512mb. In fact my main reason for upgrading my motherboard recently was so that I could get beyond the original motherboard\'s 768MB limit, because it was impacting on the software I was using.

If he\'d (and me for that matter) been using a well-designed operating system the situation would of course be different.

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Landon, all of these suggestions are good, I should mention that BOINC seems to \"overestimate\" workunits for the sulphur cycle; well actually we probably overestimate it and BOINC uses our \"conservative estimate.\" the next app (coupled model) has a more realistic estimate.

Hi,

I would like to bring your attention to an other aspect.
Cache size.

If you really look at the whole CPU-L1-L2-L3-RAM-HDD line you will see that even chache already a few cycles away.
RAM can be as much as 300 cycles away and lots not even talk about the disk with its average acces time of 8 ms
One cycle at 1.7 GHz is 0.59 ns long so it takes 13,600,000 cycles till the data from the disk starts to come in ...

What you would want to have is that there are very few cache misses so you do not need to acces the RAM often and hopefully you to need to access the HDD even less often.

Now cachesize is something you can only influence inderectly.
Buy a CPU that has lots of fast cache.
But even then it may not help since the cache is not visable to the CPU and there for you can never tell if the data you need is really there.

All you can do is hope the cache has a good strategy.

What could be done is that the programmers of this CPDN try to cut the promlem in smaller pices so it hope fully fits and stays all in cache.

Usually 90% are cache hits but if the data is to big which I asume aplies to CPDN you will have lots of cache misses and therefor your CPU will wait for data most of the time.

Btw this has nothing to do with the operating system but with how programmers are aware of hardware limitations. Still even if they are aware t depends on the problem, the programming language and the actually CPU how much he can take this in account. Since you do not know the CPU and it is abstracted away from the programmer by serval lavers (usually 5+) there is not much they can do but cut the problem in to tiny pices and hope the OS and CPU will bring out the max of the actuall setup.

one last thought - current desktop CPUs can spent up to 90 % of their time waiting for data from any of the memory levels and it will only get worse since CPUs have become faster way faster memory did and so far this difference will only grow.

Best you can do now:
at least 512 MB for XP
at least 1 GB for 64-bit CPUs
more may be good but it also means more work for the memory mangement unit so 4 GB are not neccesaryly better.

This all applies for single cores.
If you have a dual core CPU you should have more memory since both will hunger for data to process ...

Ok enough tech stuff.

Its not really something you change but I wanted to make you aware that you can not really compare CPUs just with their clock speed.
You can not really compare AMD to Intel or IBM
it depends on the prob, the RAM, and the architecture of the CPU and OS
just to name a few.

all the best to you

Holly

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Thanks for the interesting information, Holly.

Anyone who wants to know more details about their CPU and/or cache, System Information for Windows (SIW) is a very powerful tool to give you most information about your system.