Hi!
I am a new user and was trying to safe my MacBook Pro (Mac OS 10.5) from overheating. I have already set the CPU usage to 80%, saved the changes and clicked update in the BOINC front-end. However, the system still tries to start 2 processes (which by the way never show up individually under System Monitor) and use approximately 95% of my 2 cores.

What is the other field use approximately 100% of my cores good for? I thought it means to use both cores (i.e. 100% of 2 cores).

The solution so far seems to freeze one of the processes and just leave it dead in the queue. (Killing this process resulted in the system starting a new one.)

Is this problem known or is there any way to fix it?

Thanks for suggestions
Melchior

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Melchior Grutzmann
Dept. of Math
Sun Yat-sen University
participating in www.climatePrediction.net

Welcome aboard Melchior!

The Use at most X% of CPU time preference doesn't work exactly as expected. The CPU usage is not limited to the constant percentage load you specify; instead the tasks are run at full load for the percentage of time you specify and not at all for the rest of the time. With your setting of 80% your tasks would run at 100% for, say, 8 seconds and then sleep for 2 seconds. You could see any level of CPU usage depending on when System Monitor samples the activity.

The On multiprocessors, use at most X% of the processors preference limits the number of CPU cores which BOINC is allowed to use. Setting it to anything less than 100% would cause your dual core system to only run one task (on a quad core 75 >= X < 100 would use 3 cores, 50 >= X < 75 would use 2 and X < 50 would use 1).

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"The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer