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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: BOINC Agent Support
Thread: SLOW new PC |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 7
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Hi folks, I'm having some problems with my new PC. First, WGC is running much slower on my new (and much faster) PC than my old one. Roughly speaking, for every second that ticks by, it takes 3 seconds to see the clock move that one second. It seems to be stuck in molasses. This PC does have the meltdown and spectre patches, so I'm wondering if this is to blame. I know that these patches affect programs with high I/O and using an SSD (which I have). So is this to blame? Is WGC a high I/O program with lots of reads and writes? Secondly, I though with my new PC, if I ran one module, it would use one core and it could go to its maximum speed (4.6 ghz), but its not doing that at all. It's using all the cores (6 with HT too) and running MUCH slower than 4.6. My old CPU (I7 3770) would use four cores and go to the max (avg. 3.8 ghz of the maximum 3.9), while this CPU goes much slower and spreads out the work to all 12 cores (real and virtual) Is this normal behavior? Last, would getting a Ryzen-based PC run WGC better? Would it run it faster and not throttle down so readily? I just ot this intel PC so I have time to send it back and get a Ryzen PC. Thanks in advance!
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
WCG science apps should be computationally intensive, not I/O bound, so Intel's patches shouldn't have that much of an impact. Which science apps are you running? There have been reports of MIP gumming up the works, but you'd also need to give more information about each machine. CPU model, what OS, GPU too?, how much RAM, etc. Perhaps the first few tens of line of the log after start-up might help us to help you.
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
I'll check with the log. The PC has an I7 8700, with 16 gigs of ram and a NVme SSD and running Win 10. Strangely, my old PC ran WCG faster than this PC, which is superior in every way. I'm completely at a loss to understand why this is happening. On synthetic bench marks it is much faster, but not with WCG. I'm wondering if Ryzen would not throttle back so much when running the program.
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Just a guess, But I am going to say thermal throttling. Stock built computers sometimes do not have the cooling capabilities needed to run 100% cpu 24/7.
I know you said its a new computer and you probably dont want to be messing around with the internals, in case you do decide to return it. But you can remove the side panel and note how many intake/exhaust fans there are. Probably best bet would be download a thermal monitoring app to see if the cpu is throttling. |
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Steve W
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Dec 9, 2005 Post Count: 110 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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If you are seeing 1 second of WCG processing time for every 3 seconds in real time that would indicate some kind of throttling taking place. I see this kind of behaviour on one of my machines but then I have intentionally limited CPU time or the machine gets way too hot.
First, and most obviously (at least to me), is making sure that BOINC is configured to use 100% CPU time. I don't know what this defaults to on a fresh install but can be overridden using either the BOINC client itself or a profile from one of the projects you contribute processing time to. This doesn't seem to show in the BOINC log by default - I've just checked my CPU time limited machine logs and my reduction in CPU time isn't there. I imagine there is a setting to get this enabled in the log file but I don't know it. Next would be the temps of your system itself. Have you checked to make sure that it isn't overheating and CPU thermal limiting kicking in until the CPU cools down. As @joneill003 says, there is software out there that can check temperatures. One of them mentioned on here in other threads is TThrottle which not only monitors temps but allows you to control throttling. I've not used it personally but I understand it is quite good. If you're not CPU time limited by BOINC settings or overheating then you start looking at other machine bits, like I/O...etc, but rule out the easier things first. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Thanks so much for the information. I discovered the problem about 25 minutes after I last wrote to the forum a few days ago. I counted how long it took to see the seconds go by a second time and it was always at 9 seconds. I realized that would only be possible if I set it to that unknowingly. So I looked, and where I normally set the amount of CPU to use (10%), I had instead set the other parameter on how much time to 10%!! So that was why it clicked off one second for every 10 seconds passed. I then set the time to 100% and the CPU utilization to 10%, as I always had in the past. Anyway, thankfully all is well now. I do appreciate you taking the time to help me! Thanks!
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Glad to hear it is all worked out. The i7-8700 should be a fairly fast and efficient processor.
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