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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: BOINC Agent Support
Thread: MAC Mini With OS 10.8.2 Underperforms |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 4
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Polesie
Cruncher Joined: Apr 30, 2007 Post Count: 5 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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I am running grid tasks using the 7.0.31 manager on a recent quad Mac mini with the 10.8.2 OS. It has 8 GB RAM installed.
The activity monitor shows boinc_project tasks on all four cores using cpu in the high 90s, and the little fan pumps out enough heat from the mini to confirm that. I've tried to set up this machine to maximize WCG utilization, running around the clock, with lots of disk and priority. I used to get something like 3000 points and maybe 20 completed tasks a day, and now I am showing 400 points and one or two tasks. I don't see anything that looks like error messages in the logs. This may have happened after an upgrade to the .2 OS from .1, but is hard to pinpoint because of projects in the pipeline showing a gradual results slowdown. Any clues as to what may be going on? |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Maybe your CPU responds to temperature regulation... too hot, scale down the xxx Ghz the CPU runs at. My laptop can bounce between .9 and 3.1 but these days I've locked it down to 2.5, fans running in "maximum performance" mode. Of course, your BOINC runs with the "Run always" in the activity menu settings. Do scan your message log, history contained in the stdoutdae.txt file, if the client is having pauses, such as the default to run 60% [3 second on, 2 seconds off].
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Polesie
Cruncher Joined: Apr 30, 2007 Post Count: 5 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Every time I look at CPU utilization, all four cores are at 100% 95+ of that going to Boinc. If the processors were shutting down or even slowing down due to heat management, I should be able to see that in the utilization graphs, right?
I am using the Mini as a server, and seldom do any interactive work on it. Is it possible that I picked some setting that only runs the client when I actively use the machine? That would mean that this thing only runs Boinc when I am looking at it...I'm clutching at straws here... No errors in the log, except for a very occasional can't connect message, but it alwayy continues OK after one of those. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
The Mac users may have experience of this. Going from 20 results / day to 1 or 2 / day, is a huge difference, certainly if you run the same sciences. Now if you went from the old single image HCC tasks fairly light to the very heavy CEP2, there'd be an explanation. But no matter how fast or slow the CPU, these CEP2 cut off as 12 hours CPU time [not elapsed time]. At 100% load, you'd have 6-7 daily.
If BOINC throttle is used, you'd see it in the utilization, going up and down. If it were heat related, the load would stay the same, even if the CPU revs up or down. Somewhere there's mention of a fan control tool for Mac, smcfancontrol, but do these mini's even have a fan? The fan would give an audio impression of working hard or less hard. |
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