Einstein started Work

Hmmmm. What are your power saving settings? Is 'sleep' or 'hibernation' selected for anywhere?

Cheers, Mike.

You have two machines, the celeron 2.0GHz and a P4 2.66GHz. I would guess that the P4 should take around 14-20 hours per task and the celeron around 22-30 hours. There is quite a bit of variability between different tasks so it's hard to be precise.

Neither machine currently has a completed task to look at but do you recall approximately how long the P4 has been taking? I'm interested to know if perhaps both machines are performing well below average.

I asked previously and didn't get an answer - is the increment in CPU time (elapsed time) for a crunching task as shown in BOINC Manager pretty much in accord with the increment in wall clock time?

I checked the benchmarks of both your machines - the celeron shows 1048/1890 and the P4 1302/2499. These values are pretty much in line with those of similar machines that I run and so there seems to be no problem with your hosts performing as they should, at least as far as benchmarks are concerned.

At first, I was tempted to think that perhaps you had severely throttled your celeron through your preferences. Can you please check your computing preferences on the website to see if you have "use at most 100% of CPU time" set and not some drastically lower value. I can't see that it can be this because in that case the elapsed CPU time would still be normal even though the wall clock time would be very much larger. The figures you have previously listed show abnormally long CPU time which is not consistent with throttling.

There are two other things to check that I can think of - and hopefully more that others might come up with.

Firstly, is the celeron running in a hot environment or does it have a heat sink that is clogged with fluff. Is it possible that the machine is throttling itself due to thermal conditions?

Secondly, does the machine have a keyboard attached? I'm currently running a very large number of machines, most of which are running Linux and a few run Windows. Virtually all machines are headless and have no keyboard and mouse attached. Those that run Windows are afflicted by an issue that appears after a month or two of continuous running where the hard disk shows continuous activity and network activity becomes just about impossible. The CPU is still crunching but slows to a crawl. The fix is to plug in a keyboard and instantly things return to normal. The linux machines don't seem to suffer from this problem.

One final point. I notice over at Seti about 2.5 years ago you wrote a message about having to investigate why Seti crunching had slowed to a crawl. Did you ever work out why that was happening? Is your current Seti crunching performing properly or is it vastly slowed down as well? How long is it taking for your celeron to crunch a Seti task?

OK, this is obviously a "feature" of recent versions of BOINC. The most recent version I use is 6.2.15 where it is still CPU time. I seem to remember Richard Haslegrove pointing out to me at one stage that CPU efficiency had gone so I guess removing CPU time from the main display was also part of the change made.

This is useful to know, thank you, since it now removes the "difficulty" I was having with my thinking that the slow crunching wasn't due to CPU throttling. If the OP checks his task properties as suggested above and finds a very much shorter CPU time than is shown for elapsed time on the main tasks tab, then the poor performance most likely is due to CPU throttling. Funnily enough, the 2.5 year old thread over at Seti, that the OP contributed to, was to do with CPU throttling as a way of reducing the impact of BOINC on everyday computing tasks so maybe the OP introduced severe throttling at that point into his preferences and he's been saddled with poor performance ever since.