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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: BOINC Agent Support
Thread: Boinc doesn't seems to fully respect setting "Suspend when computer is in use" [Ubuntu] |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 7
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Grabbaren
Cruncher Joined: Oct 23, 2007 Post Count: 11 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Hi. Running Ubuntu Mate 17.10 on a Acer Aspire 5737Z laptop.
Using htop in Terminal, I can clearly see that the processes from wcg sometimes runs with high CPU (above 60% pr core) even if I have activated the "Suspend when computer is in use" checkbox in Boinc manager settings. Is there some combination of settings that may cancel each other out, or is this a bug? Boinc manager version 7.8.3 (x64) |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
I've experienced the same. That's because I've uninstalled Boinc. Hope the Developer Team fix this out, so I can restart using Boinc in order to contribute to important health projects!
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uplinger
Former World Community Grid Tech Joined: May 23, 2005 Post Count: 3952 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Greetings,
There is a known issue on the BOINC Client development to help fix this. However it is not under active development. The BOINC Client runs at lowest priority so even though it is showing CPU usage, if anything else on your computer actively requires CPU, then the kernel will limit the processing of the science tasks. There are other settings you can enable to help minimize the impact of the client on your machine, but these settings would need to be tweaked by the user as every scenario is a little bit different. 1. Set number of active cores to 75%, this would leave atleast one core 100% free when you first attempt to use it. 2. Set times when you want the agent to pause entirely. 3. Choosing projects that have smaller footprints on your machine. Thanks, -Uplinger |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
You can also use systemd to throttle the CPU use and/or limit the number of CPU threads (or cores, depending on details) the boinc-client.service can use (as a workaround).
* https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.resource-control.html * https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.exec.html To throttle you would set CPUQuota=xx% (where each thread is 100%, so 4x CPU threads = 400%, "CPUQuota=100%" would limit 4 WCG tasks to 25% of each CPU thread). To limit number of cores you'd set 'CPUAffinity=0 1' to limit to threads 0 and 1 (which might be two hyperthreads on one core, so you'd leave the other core completely free with 2 threads if this were a dual-core hyperthreaded device). These can also be set dynamically via the cli (as root), so if you wanted you could run a simple command to throttle back when you're using it and unthrottle when you're done - a flag "--runtime" exists, when used the changes are in memory only, without it they desired settings are saved to disk. So like let's say it's 8am and you're starting to work for the day and want to throttle back to no more than 25% of each of 4 CPU threads:: systemctl set-property --runtime boinc-client.service CPUQuota=100% ...then at 5pm when you're done working: systemctl set-property --runtime boinc-client.service CPUQuota=300% ...to give it 75% of each CPU thread to use. Could put that in a crontab even if you wanted, dealer's choice. The BOINC client even has some fancy parameters you can set manually (edit the XML by hand), such as writing an app_config.xml which limits the certain pieces of WCG applications to unique thresholds, they're covered in this wiki: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Client_configuration The tl;dr here is you can use systemd to help you tame the BOINC client and work around the issue, it has a lot of cool knobs to turn and has made using cgroups (resource control) easy on modern Linux. $0.02, hope this helps! |
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Synapp.IO
Cruncher United States Joined: Sep 16, 2017 Post Count: 18 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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@uplinger @xithryx - these are workarounds. The fact is - as @Grabbaren said - the BOINC client is working very poorly on Ubuntu. I reported a couple of bugs, but there doesn't seem to be any work on it. I also tried to debug it myself, but didn't manage to find the root cause as of yet:
- with the latest BOINC client on Ubuntu 18.04, the setting dialogs come up empty - BOINC manager seem to have some kind of memory leak - BOINC no longer respects the "only run when plugged in" which is eating my battery - BOINC is no longer respecting the "maximum % CPU" used - before I never had the laptop overheating, however since updating to 18.04, the fans run at maximum whenever BOINC is active - Also, as @Grabbaren, it doesn't seem to suspend itself when I'm using the laptop, I have to suspend it manually - But even when I suspend manually, sometimes it resumes on its own I continue to run it because it's a cause close to my heart, but I'm sure many have abandoned it because of all these bugs. And all of these are regressions because on Ubuntu 17.04 it worked fine. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
@Synapp.IO - I literally wrote the word "workaround" in my first sentence. :)
Have you reported your problems to the appropriate coders, right here? https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/issues |
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Wisesooth
Cruncher United States Joined: Aug 5, 2016 Post Count: 9 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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The latest version of BOINC on my machines is 7.12.1 I am running Windows x64 version 10, not Ubuntu. Having no trouble with the issues mentioned here. Are you using the latest version of BOINC that can be used by Ubuntu? If not, try upgrading BOINC to the latest version. That might at least narrow the range of suspects.
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