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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: BOINC Agent Support
Thread: Tip: Reduce mds & mdworker CPU usage on Mac (Spotlight) when crunching |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 5
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gaddagah
Cruncher Joined: Nov 23, 2005 Post Count: 5 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Hi everybody,
----------------------------------------When checking the activity monitor on my Macs a couple of days ago I realised that the "mds" process (which is the Spotlight indexer) was using up to 80% of CPU when BOINC was running. I don't know how long this has been the case and if this has been an issue with older versions, but for me it was definitely an issue on several Macs running version 7.0.31 of the BOINC client and Snow Leopard or Mountain Lion. After letting Spotlight reindexing the whole harddrive the problem was still there, so – after some experimenting – I had the idea to exclude the Boinc files from the Spotlight search (you can do this under System Preferences - Spotlight - Privacy). After I've added the "/Library/Application Support/BOINC Data" folder to the Privacy list, the CPU usage of the mds process dropped significantly (so that I may use this CPU power for crunching, as intended  ). I guess that BOINC is permanently writing the progress of its tasks to some project or temp file in this folder which let Spotlight constanly index this file. As I haven't found anything about this issue on this forum, I thought I'd share my findings with you. Hope it is of help to some of you!  |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Thanks for that good tip. Same applies to at least Vista/W7, probably W8. I've long excluded the BOINC data-dir [C:\ProgramData\BOINC default] from indexing, simply because they are in a continuous state of flux. Whilst, the general user file indexing is set in the task scheduler to only happen at night after 03:00 CET.
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branjo
Master Cruncher Slovakia Joined: Jun 29, 2012 Post Count: 1892 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Thank you gaddagah, will check my Mac running 7.0.31 at Mountain Lion and apply your recommendation. I hope it will speed up crunching :-)
----------------------------------------Cheers and NI!  Crunching@Home since January 13 2000. Shrubbing@Home since January 5 2006  |
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BSD
Senior Cruncher Joined: Apr 27, 2011 Post Count: 224 Status: Offline |
Thanks for that tip. On my OS X Mountain Lion, BOINC processes went from average 96% to 98% CPU and the mds process spikes went down.
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Bearcat
Master Cruncher USA Joined: Jan 6, 2007 Post Count: 2803 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Thanks for that good tip. Same applies to at least Vista/W7, probably W8. I've long excluded the BOINC data-dir [C:\ProgramData\BOINC default] from indexing, simply because they are in a continuous state of flux. Whilst, the general user file indexing is set in the task scheduler to only happen at night after 03:00 CET. I shut it off (Win7) completely. 
Crunching for humanity since 2007!
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