Indeed, we are looking into the possibility of capping CPU usage by the agent. As with many of the other excellent suggestion from the WCG participants, we are dilligently working to prioritize, size and address what we can. Please be patient, as the list is long.

In the mean time, might i suggest that you set the agent to run during the less critical hours in your day? By setting the schedule through the Member Area -->Device Manager --> Device profile page, you can set the agent to run only off-peak.

Thank you,
Lilac

Sorry, but your friends are wrong. Rosetta runs with the lowest priority on the system. This means that it runs only when there is nothing else to do on the system. The moment something else needs the CPU it is immediately preempted. The only issue with 100% utilization is regarding the heat buildup in some systems. If you have adequate cooling and clear out the dust occassionally, you'll be fine.

Having said that, Rosetta can cause your system to slow down a bit from time to time, but it has nothing to do with CPU utilization. It has to do with the amount of RAM it uses and paging.

Rosetta currently allocates ~200MB of RAM but only uses about 25MB. If you don't have enough RAM, Windows will start to page. This paging can cause a pretty serious performance hit. However, after a while, Windows realizes that we're not using about 175MB of it and permanently pages it out and suddenly your system should be responding more smoothly.

So you see, a CPU throttle for WCG would not help your problem because it's a RAM issue. We are working on further reducing the memory footprint Rosetta uses.

Useful piece of software which I successfully installed following a recomendation from someone else in these forums is Threadmaster.

This restricts the amount of processor time which any given application/process can use to a percentage which you can choose.

Get it from http://threadmaster.tripod.com

It does involve configuring parameters via the registry which is a bit of a pain, especially if you wish to adjust the percentage every now and again, but instructions on the site are reasonably clear. To change the percentage limit you need to edit the registry entry, then stop and restart the Threadmaster service.

Can set a maximum percentage which will apply to any process, but can also set specific limits for selected processes. I found it was a bit unpredictable if you set the general limit to 100%, so I set it to 90% and it runs nicely. Have the limit for the Rosetta process set to 25% to keep my Win XP laptop cool.

It works on Win2000 and above.

I would like to add my voice to the many others requesting that a CPU throttle control which can be adjusted real time (i.e. not just when profile is updated by communication with server) be added into the program. It would be more convenient.

I think that the best way is to implement the selection of cpu % of usage into the agent, not to use external applications.

I hope they implement it because I don't want my laptops to get overheated and the fans working always.

if the agent let us set something like

"top of CPU usage %" and let us chosse a set of values like:
10%
20%
30%

and son

THAT will be the solution.

I would like to keep the agent running all the time my laptops are on but dont' want my fans goes crazy and my laptops starting to heat.

That's the most retarded reasoning I've ever heard. The man doesn't want to be able to throttle any application, just the grid agent. I don't know why there is so much resistance to this idea. Other grid agents have it. It's something that would take five lines of code to fix. Hell, give me the source and I'll do it for you.