World Community Grid - View Thread

I'm a new user that is one of the first things I noticed, that my CPU fan kicks on very frequently when running this program. I don't usually hear it unless I'm doing some heavy graphics editing. This concerns me, for while I leave my computer on a lot, it's not constantly running at top speed. Someone wrote that all programs use 100% of the CPU power, but that's not for 100% of the time. When I look at the Task Manager right now I have 34 processes running and most all of them are showing 0 processor usage.

Yes, all CPUs run 100% of the time. Think of it like your car engine. When you're stopped at a light, you're not going anywhere but your engine is still running. The term for this is "idling". CPUs are just like engines in this case. When it's not doing any "useful" work, it idles.

There is a special process on every operating system that runs at the lowest priority possible, generically called the "Idle" process. This is what runs when there is absolutely nothing else to do on the system. Task Manager reports "useful" CPU utilization. i.e. it doesn't count the CPU time that this idle process runs. Thus you see fluctuations in "CPU utilization" as reported by the Task Manager.

Now, this idle process doesn't do much. In fact it just executes a bunch of NOP (no operation) instructions on the CPU. The difference between all other processes and the idle process is that other processes use more of the CPU (and thus more transistors) to do calculations and other processing. This is where the heat difference occurs. More transistors being used causes more heat.

I also thought the program would run in the background and allow me to run my own screensaver. I collect/scan lots of graphics and photos that I show with the Slideshow screensaver and have no wish to watch this boring program twirl a molecule about.

You can run your own screensaver. The agent will still run in the background just fine (unless you explicitly told it to run ONLY as a screensaver). I myself use the Slideshow screensaver to cycle through my photos from all my scuba diving trips smile

Because the Agent runs at the lowest priority, it will always run in place of the idle process (that's why you see the CPU being reported at 100%). Thus, it shouldn't interfere with anything you are doing on your computer. Everything else gets a chance to run first.

I believe in the good intentions behind this program, but if users are not given more flexibility, I don't think it will have much staying power with a wider audience. After two days, I'm tempted to just uninstall the program and maybe try again in a year or two.

I'm not sure what you mean by "more flexibility". You have the option to run it as a screensaver..or not. You can set up custom run policies so that it runs only during certain hours and not others. You can put it to sleep or exit it at any point if you need to for some reason.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?

BTW, we do have a FAQ on why your CPU utilization is 100% when running this program in our Software FAQ (#100 ironically enough):
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/join_now/software_faqs.html#100