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zonetuke · Apr 6, 2005, 11:23 AM

I installed the Boinc Menubar 4.25v2. It definitely works and is crunching away like mad on my SETI account for TeamMacNN. I do have one problem. When I run it, START on the menu, it runs all the time! On the website I configured it to only run after 20 minutes of idletime. However it seems to ignore that setting. Can anyone give me a clue how to overcome this problem?

thanks

matthew

Shaktai · Apr 6, 2005, 08:44 PM

Originally posted by zonetuke:
I installed the Boinc Menubar 4.25v2. It definitely works and is crunching away like mad on my SETI account for TeamMacNN. I do have one problem. When I run it, START on the menu, it runs all the time! On the website I configured it to only run after 20 minutes of idletime. However it seems to ignore that setting. Can anyone give me a clue how to overcome this problem?

thanks

matthew

You may need to "update" so it recognizes the new preferences. Essentially the menubar is just a GUI control for a CLI application. If the update doesn't do the job, then you may want to report it as a bug.

Also consider that while the menubar shows it running, it may actually have suspended computation (the program is in memory, but no work is being done). The preference setting doesn't actually start and stop the program, it just suspends activity. If the menubar program actually quit, it wouldn't know when to resume calculation. Try checking the log window to see if it shows suspended activity, or Use your activity monitor to check for activity.

zonetuke · Apr 6, 2005, 09:07 PM

Hi Shaktai, I Updated the project a few times. Even as I type this message Boinc is maxing out both my processors, per Activity Monitor. So it still is not recognizing the activity of my computer, while it should only start after my computer has been idle for 20 minutes. maybe it is a bug.

Shaktai · Apr 6, 2005, 09:19 PM

Originally posted by zonetuke:
maybe it is a bug.

Probably is. Check the Seti forums maybe to see if it has been reported there. The menubar control works well, but it is "beta" and still under development. If it is a problem, you might be better off going to the "release" 4.19 version until a later Mac OS release version comes out. We do have "optimized 4.19 versions on the Team Resource Page.

Laurence · Apr 7, 2005, 01:55 AM

It is not a bug in the SETI Menu thing. The command line version does the same thing and always has. The code to determine whether the processor is idle or not has never functioned on the Mac OS. This is a huge issue and is preventing many people from running BOINC/SETI on the Mac.

beadman · Apr 10, 2005, 11:10 AM

Laurence:
I'm not sure I see your problem...the BOINC stuff runs in the background at a very low priority, and only uses the CPU when you are NOT using it...why do you only want it to run after the computer has been idle for 20 minutes? (I'm not trying to be argumentative - just trying to understand) I run BOINC on an iBook and a PowerBook and see no noticeable slow down in any application when BOINC is running. I frequently have MS Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Preview, Entourage, Eudora and Meeting Maker all open at the same time on my PowerBook at work, and BOINC merrily crunchs CPDN and SETI in the background. I do major cut and paste activity, writing, optimizing spreadhsheets, etc., and see NO slowdowns because of BOINC.

You can easily check by opening Activity Monitor and parking it over on the side where you can see the little moving window displaying the CPU usage. Then open Safari and go somewhere you can download a several Megabyte file - say, get a new copy of Adobe Reader. Turn off BOINC, and time the download while watching the Activity Monitor. Then start up BOINC and download the same file again. The times should be nearly identical. Then, post again and let us know what you found out.

beadman

Laurence · 10:39 PM

I realize that this is the way priorities are supposed to work and this may be indicative of a bug in the Mac OS kernel and not seti@home/boinc, but if I stop SETI and launch something that stresses the system. (eg. Marble Blast, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, etc) like most games I experience a noticeable drop in frame rates. The same thing goes for video encoding. If I start a FFMPEG encode at priority 0 and SETI is running at Priority 19 (default) the encoding is drastically slower. If I then launch top -us60 from the command line to average 60 seconds of output and sort by processor usage. I notice FFMPEG taking around 60% of the CPU and setiathome taking around 36%. If I kill off the seti task, ffmpeg jumps to around 98 and speeds up accordingly. I admit that if I am web browsing or just editing a document in Word or something I don't notice the slowdown, but that's just because Word doesn't need that much CPU power to edit a document.

Whatever is causing these issues needs to be corrected either at the OS level or by adding code to setiathome/boinc so that it will not run when other tasks are taking more than x% of the CPU. and x should be defined from within the boinc preferences.

beadman · Apr 10, 2005, 09:48 PM

Ah, now I see. I'm not into the heavy-computational games at all, or video work for that matter, so I haven't experienced any of those slowdowns. When I take a break, a little Snood is more my style <G>.

Hopefully, someone at Berkeley will take notice and search for the bug.

C

Lateralus · Apr 11, 2005, 05:24 PM

Has anybody here tried editing BOINC Menubar's package contents to include Mikkyo's optimized client?

mikkyo · Apr 12, 2005, 02:36 AM

Originally posted by Lateralus:
Has anybody here tried editing BOINC Menubar's package contents to include Mikkyo's optimized client?

Hold Control, click on Boinc Menubar, choose Show Package Contents from the popup menu.
Open Contents, then Resources, replace boinc with an optimized boinc client of your choice renamed to "boinc".

jeffreyloaf · Apr 12, 2005, 11:04 PM

I have the same problems as Lateralus. I must stop boinc (it doesn't matter if I use terminal or boinc menubar). If I'm playing Battlefield 1942 I'll get pauses in the game; which sucks. I hope it gets fixed.

Hey mikkyo it work for me. My results for my Dual 2.5 are
2281 double precision
5396 integer MIPS (Drystone) per cpu

virex · Apr 12, 2005, 11:40 PM

Originally posted by Lateralus:
Has anybody here tried editing BOINC Menubar's package contents to include Mikkyo's optimized client?

yeah and according to boincview, my mini went from 5.75 credits/hour to 6.76

so it's a nice upgrade, and def worth it

fillmeup · Apr 14, 2005, 09:18 PM

I finally went back to being without boinc view. Every once in a while it would just stop. You couldn't tell unless you looked at the Activity monitor. Ran it for a number of weeks. Had the problem a couple of times in that span and I figured it was not worth it. It appears that the problem arose when switching projects.

Back to the good old cron!

beadman · Apr 17, 2005, 09:46 PM

Originally Posted by mikkyo

Hold Control, click on Boinc Menubar, choose Show Package Contents from the popup menu.
Open Contents, then Resources, replace boinc with an optimized boinc client of your choice renamed to "boinc".

Thanks for the info, Mikkyo. My new iBook went from 627/1971 to 909/2146.

beadman