CPU suspended?

Hi Oldman,

Welcome to Einstein!  We hope you enjoy your time here.

You just need to spend a bit of time browsing the various preference settings and thinking about what each one might do.  Whilst the defaults are generally OK (so resist the urge to change things if you're not really sure what something might do when changed) you do need to become familiar with a few of them so you can get things working they way you would like.  If you're not sure about a particular setting, please ask first.

If you go to your account page tab on the website, you will see 4 separate links on the second line.  Click on the preferences link.  The page that opens will have links for 5 different preference sets.  The first two - computing and project - are probably the most important to start with.  Your 'issue' is under computing but there are things you should think about that are specific to this project under the project link.

Open the computing link.  The trick is that it looks almost bare, except for that 'Advanced Settings' sub-menu.  That wording seems to scare people away.  If I had my way I'd change it to 'Mandatory Settings - You Must Look Here!!!' - or something like that :-).  If you open that sub-menu, I'm sure you'll figure out what you need to change.  Just remember, if you make changes anywhere in that rather large set of preferences, scroll down to the very bottom and click the 'save changes' link.  This will make sure your changes are saved on the website.

Your BOINC client will be told about those changes when it next contacts the project.  You can force the client to contact immediately (rather than waiting for it to decide in its own good time) by clicking on 'update' in your local BOINC Manager.  If you really want to be able to see all that is happening, use the 'Advanced view' and not the 'Simple view' for BOINC Manager.  Maybe you are already doing that.  If you want to be able to check things from time to time, you should investigate all the options in the Advanced view.

So, if you are browsing in firefox, you are 'active', and BOINC will be pausing the science tasks for a lot of the time.  If you have a setting for 'Keep tasks in memory when suspended' set to 'No' those tasks would be unloaded from memory and some processing time would be lost because a task (when restarted) couldn't restart from where it was but would have to read from disk where it was the last time its state (called a checkpoint) was saved (which could be some time ago).  If you then move the mouse or tap a key, the computer is suddenly active again and the whole cycle gets repeated.  Modern computers are pretty good at multi-tasking so you should try allowing things to run when the user is active and keep thing in memory when suspended.

With regard to 'fans screaming' is your computer a laptop?  Please realise that science tasks are compute intensive.  The load will draw more power and all power consumed ends up as heat.  If you don't have a top notch cooling solution, you have to be careful about excess heat buildup.  When was the last time you checked for potential blockages to airflow?  If heat is a problem, use BOINC's setting to cut back on the number of cores/threads allowed to run tasks.  Your processor is 4 core/8 threads.  How many tasks are you running simultaneously?  Hopefully not the full 8, if it's a laptop :-).

Anyhow, have a think about all the above.  If you find features/settings you aren't sure about, please come back and ask.