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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: BOINC Agent Support
Thread: BOINC causing an issue with late model MacBook Pro battery cycle counter. |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 7
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andreic
Advanced Cruncher Canada Joined: Nov 19, 2004 Post Count: 100 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Hi,
After a whole bunch of testing and thinking about my next step, I've decided to stop crunching work units after 16 years. The thing that pushed me over the edge was my early 2019 MacBook Pro. It has a spanky cool i9 processor that can crunch a lot fast, but I've also noticed that it doesn't like BOINC at all. What I'm seeing is that the battery charge cycle counter would go up by 3 every day when the system was not in use. The laptop was always plugged in and the battery is at 100%, but in 7 months of ownership, the battery was showing over 780 charge cycles. These batteries are warranted for 1000 cycles, and at a reasonable usage rate, like untethered discharge once a day, should be about 3-5 years, not 8 months. Luckily my keyboard was giving me lots of grief and Apple replaced the keyboard and battery for free. My new battery had zero charge cycles on it, I fired everything up, did some work, checked, still zero cycles, went for lunch and the computer went dormant as usual, and then had a charge cycle logged. Always plugged in and at 100%. I shut down BOINC, and the charge cycle counter stopped incrementing. So, BOINC doesn't like the early 2019 15-inch Macbook Pros running Mojave. I cannot comment on the late 2019s or Catalina. My various other systems are fine (if hot) and do not increment the charge counters. My points have been donated to User Friendly. Thanks, Andrei from The Great White North |
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Sgt.Joe
Ace Cruncher USA Joined: Jul 4, 2006 Post Count: 7846 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Sorry to see you go. It is unfortunate that the use of laptops for many, though not all , is problematic. Most laptops are simply not built to run their cpus at 100%. Numerous reports are out there about heat dissipation problems. Yours is the first I have seen of the battery cycling problem. Very unfortunate.
----------------------------------------I may be mistaken, but I think this is due to a lack of adequate quality and performance testing by manufacturers. If their machines are not capable of performing at 100% for lengthy periods of time, then they should so state. I feel bad for you because your machine sounds like it has pretty hefty specs and you probably paid a pretty penny for it, so not having it perform to your expectations is disappointing. Good luck and hope to see you back sometime. Cheers
Sgt. Joe
*Minnesota Crunchers* |
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Mike.Gibson
Ace Cruncher England Joined: Aug 23, 2007 Post Count: 12594 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Laptops are designed for transportation, not fixed site 24/7 operation. A small form desktop would have been a better idea.
How long would a charge last in full operation? If only 8 hours then that would explain the number of cycles. If more than a day, then maybe it is better to only connect to mains when the battery is low. I suspect that the count indicates another charge cycle starting when the battery has only a small depletion level which is why the count is so high. Mike |
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andreic
Advanced Cruncher Canada Joined: Nov 19, 2004 Post Count: 100 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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The last time I ran this laptop on battery, it had a life of about 4 hours. Which was odd.
BUT, this laptop is being used as a tethered desktop surrogate and always plugged in. So MacOS is incrementing the charge counter when the machine is plugged in with a fully charged battery, and not running at 100% more like 45%, since the CPU running flat out without the GPU will overwhelm the 85 Watt charger and discharge the battery. In my last test, plugged in, the battery went from 100% to 100% over the period of 1 hour and was declared 1 charge cycle. The power capacity graph in the system monitor showed that the charge level didn't drop below 100%. This is more complex than the battery actually being cycled. Andrei |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
However many threads there are in your I9, start by allowing n/100% for "On Multiprocessor systems, use at most n% of the processors", so at 8 threads set the allowed CPU use to 12.5% and observe.
----------------------------------------[Edit 1 times, last edit by Former Member at Jan 24, 2020 3:48:11 PM] |
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Sgt.Joe
Ace Cruncher USA Joined: Jul 4, 2006 Post Count: 7846 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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since the CPU running flat out without the GPU will overwhelm the 85 Watt charger and discharge the battery. This is absolutely the kind of information the manufacturer should be providing so the customer can be informed of the machine's capabilities. Seems like a case of over-promising and under delivering. Cheers
Sgt. Joe
*Minnesota Crunchers* |
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Mike.Gibson
Ace Cruncher England Joined: Aug 23, 2007 Post Count: 12594 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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I understand that an i9 has up to 36 threads, according to the version, so start the setting at 10% and increase in 10% steps until you find what the battery is not capable of, then interpolate between the last 2 settings and repeat until you find the limit.
This seems to be a problem of the machine not being able to support the i9 rather than a problem caused by BOINC. I still reckon you are using the machine in a way that it was not designed for. Was this a case of being sold the wrong product or did you specify a laptop? Mike |
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