Finally, Silver

Patrick

Hello! I am new here (made my account 2 days ago), i heard about this from a friend and felt like ''hey, why not do something to help, cant hurt right?''. Yet, thats exactly what installing your application did... I dont know exactly why, but for some reason, my cpu load keeps fluxuating between ~20% load and ~95% load. This in turn causes my cpu heatsink fan to fluxuate accordingly, since it is set to run in sync with cpu temperatures, wich rise when the load does. I have run the program with an open chassi and witnessed the fan go from a couple hundred rpm to the max speed. It keeps switching between these two ''modes'' with about 2 seconds between each switch. If you could somehow make the program work in a more consistent manner then you could potentially cut the work-times in half, and increase stability. As of now, my cpu fluxuates between 35-70 degrees every few seconds, and im not planning to buy a new one for a while, and this behavior wears it down, not to mention the fan itself. Constantly turning it on and off... However, my problems aside, i figured since this thread seems to be viewed very often, i decided to post it here, altough i dont know where to actually do it. For now, im going to set my fan to manual at a static value, but not all your users might be as keen on computers as i am. This behavior could decrease the lifetime of cpu's and PC's in general... I am currently running an overclocked i5 4670k at 4.3 gh/z, (sometimes 4.5), but i have tested this with the default clock of 3.4 (turbo disabled) and it behaves the same way still. I know comparing it to a cpu stress test might be a bit silly, but if you could make it use a more consistent pattern, like fluxuate between 60% and 90% when idle, without removing the feature wich turns the load down accordingly when the system needs more processing power, that would be much appreciated (from all of us, altough likely unknowingly of what exactly the difference is ^^ ). If this has something to do with my personal rig, then feel free to ask me about my system.specs, but i havent seen this on this level in too many other programs so i think it might just be a minor error in workload distribution. Thank you, prematurely. <3 .

"~20% load and ~95% load"

The reason is, BOINC is default set to use 50 or 60% of the CPU time [to assume protection against overheating FOR LAPTOPS... it can't smell what computer it is being installed on, so safety first]. As a result BOINC alternates between pause and run **. This causes the sawtooth load you see. For desktops it's fine to set the CPU Time use to 100% [unless the fan noise is disturbing the peace].

For laptops the setting is best at 50%, because it then equal pauses and runs 1 second each. This prevents rev-up/rev-down of fans in most all cases [alternating is bad for anything mechanical]

** The older default of 60% CPU time causes a run of 3 seconds, and a pause of 2 seconds [most anything in BOINC managing happens in whole seconds, never in fractions], where 3 seconds is long enough to then cause the fans to kick in and out.

/ot

At long last..... ruby!

Hello again! I'm sorry for not seeing your replies sooner, fellow crunchers :3 . Ive been on.. eerh, ''vacation'', and when i got back i had some issues logging in so i just kinda ditched wcg for a bit. But i did as you told me (i feel stupid not seeing this easy fix right away myself :D ) and it now works perfectly fine. Still feel like they could have done it differently, the developers that is, but oh well, what can you do? Ive had it run for a while now and it works just fine. So, i guess a thx is in order... so... yeah, there you go. Ciao!