Hello Gandalf_the_Grey,
Low priority is part of the basic design of BOINC. The low priority is reset many times during ordinary operation. The benchmark test is an exception and is run at normal priority. The idea is that most processes on a computer run only a small part of the time and let the OS run NOP ( a low power No Operation command ) most of the time. Oversimplifying, BOINC simply uses all the cycles that would otherwise be running NOP. Therefore BOINC does ensure that the CPU runs at maximum power generating maximum heat. There is no way to change this without rewriting boinc.exe.

Lawrence

Hi Gandalf_the_Grey,
There was a lot of experimenting on this in the first year of WCG, but people finally accepted what the WCG staff said. boinc.exe keeps resetting the priorities of the threads at all sorts of points. There are ways to set priorities in Windows and other operating systems, but boinc.exe triumphs over all of them. Anyway, the time gained would be minimal unless the priority was high enough to interfere with interrupts, in which case the OS would crash. Any background task that is both unimportant and takes up a lot of time that could be better used by BOINC is badly written and should be uninstalled / replaced. Ordinary systems do not have anything like that running, so even running at lowest priority, BOINC grabs most of the system.

Usually. . .

Lawrence

The benchmarks also runs at idle priority, this was changed a long time ago.


Getting most(*) BOINC-applications to run at same priority as the BOINC-client is trivial, you only need to RTFM.
Specifically, to cc_config.xml under the <options>-section, add a line with <no_priority_change>1</no_priority_change> (or change from zero to 1 if already have a line about no_priority_change).

While it's easy to do this change, it's unlikely it will have any positive impact on production. More likely is this change will severely degrade responsiveness to anything else you're trying to do with the computer, and it can look like computer has hanged.


(*): The setting of process-priority normally uses the BOINC-API, but some applications can't be re-compiled to include neccessary BOINC-code and uses a wrapper instead. Depending on wrapper-version used it's not certain the "science"-process is always set to idle as default.