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Posts by old_user182684

Posts by old_user182684

1) Questions and Answers : Preferences : Swapping makes computer unusable (Message 22186)
Posted 19 Apr 2006 by old_user182684
Post:
The graphics is most likely on-board, but 10MB shared memory more or less are not causing the problem here. The problem is two orders of magnitude bigger. In fact, you can let the machine sit after boot, without any users logging in (BOINC service started on boot though), and the swap orgy will start soon after. If you then press ctrl-alt-del, it can take up to a minute of swapping only to free enough memory for the damn password prompt to appear.

512MB is pretty much what Joe Sixpack gets when he buys a plain vanilla computer these days. If I look at our intranet, it is what our IT dept considers its \"standard computer\" (we\'re a research institute). The point of my question is: Is it possible to change CPDN\'s settings in a way that such a standard computer will be usable for ANY other work if CPDN is running in the background? Having to wait 10s between any two keystrokes in Word - because parts of Word are constantly swapped out - does not qualify for usability. And if 512MB is too little for this requirement, please change the website and don\'t call it the \"recommended amount of memory\".

@Les Bayliss: Yes, but that\'s the whole point. \"How long it takes will depend on how much swap space is being used\" - exactly. CPDN takes more or less all physical memory on a 512MB machine, so all foreground work will slow down to a crawl because of swapping. _How_do_I_change_that_if_possible?_
2) Questions and Answers : Preferences : Swapping makes computer unusable (Message 22182)
Posted 18 Apr 2006 by old_user182684
Post:
There are two models running (otherwise the CPU would only be 50% loaded). But as I said, suspending/aborting one of them wouldn\'t help, because one alone would still render the machine unusable for other work.

If the recommendation is 512MB min, it should be stated somewhere that this amount will not allow much else than CPDN and the operating system on the machine before it goes into perma-swap. I\'d actually call it \"minimum requirement\", not \"minimum recommendation\" (which should be >=1G then, at least for non-dedicated machines)

Is there really no way of forcing the model towards more cooperative behaviour?
3) Questions and Answers : Preferences : Swapping makes computer unusable (Message 22177)
Posted 18 Apr 2006 by old_user182684
Post:
Adding more memory is not an option, because there\'s no budget. The idea was to donate idle CPU cycles, not setting up dedicated CPDN machines.

The memory requirements _for_the_machine,not_the_model_ are listed as \"at least 256MB, recommended 512\". What else is running at the same time? Well, there are people *working* on the machine. Matlab, Eclipse, Openoffice, Firefox. I\'d expect BOINC/CPDN to respect that and refrain from using an amount of virtual memory larger than the available physical memory (which is stupid anyway) if somebody is typing away on the machine at the same time.

Is \"surrender your whole machine or detach\" really the only choice I have? The old CPDN models were a bit more reasonable in that respect.

4) Questions and Answers : Preferences : Swapping makes computer unusable (Message 22175)
Posted 18 Apr 2006 by old_user182684
Post:
I\'ve installed BOINC as an XP service on two student machines in my office over the weekend, and attached to CPDN. Both are P4 3.0, 512MB, plenty of disk. Both students came to me this morning because their machines were unusable - they were constantly swapping memory. The process list (which took around two minutes to get itself enough memory to display) showed two CPDN processes each using between 250 and 400MB of VM, constantly swapping in and out with wildly fluctuating physical memory usage. Suspending one wouldn\'t help - the other one would still drain the machine, whether the user tried to work on it or not.
I\'m using the standard preferences (which I thought should keep the process reasonably \"backgroundy\") - anyone with similar problems, and how did you fix it?




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