All my machines suffer to some extent performance degredation due to CPU spikes. I've defined "use at most" 70% of cycles but has little effect.

Would also like BOINC to call home (firewalled of course) automatically .. maybe it can and I've missed a preference.

Um... those spikes you see are from the CPU throttling. What it does is pause the calculation, continue the calculation. It won't use 70% of your CPU.

As for the calling home, you mean reporting? BOINC will do that within 24 hours after the task has been finished or at the next request for work.

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All my machines suffer to some extent performance degredation due to CPU spikes. I've defined "use at most" 70% of cycles but has little effect.

Would also like BOINC to call home (firewalled of course) automatically .. maybe it can and I've missed a preference.

The "Use at most" feature is for thermal control and not performance problems. See this BOINC FAQ Service message for more information about how the "Use at most" feature is designed to work.

As for suffering performance degradation due to CPU spikes, I would question that conclusion. The science application runs at low priority meaning that it should have little effect on system performance at all, including when running other applications.

I personally would look elsewhere for the performance degradation such as heat, dust, hard drive fragmentation, or even some firewall/anti-malware applications that may think the CPU spikes are being caused by some hacker/malware.

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I should RTFM first :blushes:

@ Ageless: Cheers for that I'll increase the WU's ("Maintain enough work for an additional" option). When I returned 3 were complete not reported and one was 80-ish%. That way I'll not need to manually hit the "Update" button.
Ah, CPU throttling .. I had no idea that's how it worked. I had concluded as you no doubt guessed that the option restricted CPU useage to a maximum of 70% (in my case) of available CPU processing or put it another way retricting CPU usage to a maximum of 70% for all applications/services but in retrospect I didn't think that out.

@Ozzfan: Thanks for expanding on the "Use at most" option (link was most helpful). I set "Use at most" to 100%. This flatlined CPU at 100%!!

I notice that local settings over-ride web based setting unless the "clear" option is used. That's useful to know.

Thanks again you're both extremely helpful. I salute your dedication, knowledge and patience with us noobies. I'll try find some time to play around and educate myself before posting again ;)

Cheers
A..

Thanks again you're both extremely helpful. I salute your dedication, knowledge and patience with us noobies. I'll try find some time to play around and educate myself before posting again ;)

Don't sweat it! We enjoy helping people. Ask away if you don't understand something. ;-)

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Thanks again you're both extremely helpful. I salute your dedication, knowledge and patience with us noobies. I'll try find some time to play around and educate myself before posting again ;)

Don't sweat it! We enjoy helping people. Ask away if you don't understand something. ;-)

Just remember that we've been noobies once as well and even now we still don't know or understand everything and have to ask around at times. :-)

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