I'm still gathering characteristics of this problem, so be forewarned.

When I go to use my computer in the morning after leaving Seti running (6 core + NVidia GTX 460 with 2 units on it, all Lunatics stuff, Windows 7) the mouse moves but the interface (of all Windows) is locked up.

After a few seconds, the mouse locks up, too.

I hit ctrl-alt-delete to bring up the task manager, but nothing happens for something like 3-10 minutes, then it finally "takes", allowing me to start the task manager. At that point, though, the computer UI is unlocked.



I thought maybe BOINC was setting Seti@home to way too high a priority, starving the general UI. So I went to a web sight with an analog clock widget to just keep something else running at regular intervals.

With that clock web page up, this never happens. Without it, it almost always happens.


Perhaps the Seti app is only checking for user movement detection every time a full work packet is done, which is about every 10-20 minutes for a cuda? If so, it should check more frequently in its internal looping.

Perhaps it happens because I leave the BOINC app as the foreground app with the stats tab (the graph) up? And maybe Windows boosts it a priority class, which, when added to "high priority", out-classes the UI's priority? But with the clock app "solution", it's the web browser that's foreground? That would be a good test. Leave the clock web app up, but make BOINC be the foreground app.

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try running BOINC with active tasks showing only.
Also when you start using the PC just right click on the BOINC icon and snooze the GPU processing. this will stop the lag

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

Mine started doing that too after I did the upgrade from vista to Win 7 64bit. I did a number of things so I'm not sure which one cured it. I think it was going to sleep and though the mouse movement woke up the monitor it took it awhile for the operating system to wake up. Most of the time the mouse would freeze just before it finally came to life. I finally found the setting to keep it awake but I really don't remember where. It had nothing to do with BOINC though, that I'm sure of.

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PROUD MEMBER OF Team Starfire World BOINC

Snoozing the GPU is no use since I'm leaving it on for the purpose of letting it run overnight.

I don't think the computer's going to sleep, or to hibernation (two well-defined terms) though apparently just "sleep" is an option in Windows 7; hibernate is gone.

Yes, just checked. Under power options: Put the computer to sleep: never (under High Performance, which I have checked.)



Last night I put up the clock app but had the BOINC app in foreground; there was no lock up on waking the computer up this morning. Perhaps better to say de-screen-savering it, which in this case, means waking up the monitors.

Over the next few days I will try again with and without the clock, and with and without BOINC in the foreground, and log it better to see if I can get a reproducible scenario.

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Reason I said I wasn't sure what cured it was I had just got a new monitor plus windows 7. I fiddled around with the sleep settings in windows plus messing with the settings in the new monitor itself. Some combination of whatever I did cured it. By waking the monitor, I meant I am now never letting it go to sleep, I just turn it off when I leave the computer for more than a few minutes. When I turn it back on I have to wiggle the mouse to let it know I'm back. After that it stays on until I turn it off again. I have a wireless mouse that tends to sleep until I wiggle it so I am actually just waking it up. The screen does come on when I hit the power.

Oh, under power options, system settings, there is an option "when I press the power button..." and another "when I press the sleep button..." If you check the drop down options on them you find hibernate as one of the choices.

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PROUD MEMBER OF Team Starfire World BOINC

Ok, here are some recorded stats from the past few days of every time I went away from the computer:


Lockups with only BOINC app: 2
No lockups with BOINC and either clock or game app running: 4


My working theory is BOINC is assigning a priority far too high that supersedes the UI's priority. And, specifically, it's the CUDA app (Lunatics Seti custom), and that the UI is unlocked when it finished and switches to another CUDA work unit. Hence it may remain locked, even to ctrl-alt-delete, up to about 20 minutes, which is how long a work unit takes.



I have to question the wisdom of such an intense priority. With nothing else going on, normal, or even low priority should get essentially 100% CPU time. Alternatively, insert a brief system pause into the industrial strength worker thread every 30s or so to give other processes, including the UI, a brief time slice.

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I've set max processor usage to 99.99% instead of 100.0%. Let's see what happens. Should, in theory, force exactly the kind of system pause that I described, regardless of what pathological priority gets set.

How well it works depends on what their code thinks "99.99%" means. For all I know, they're getting CPU usage from a system call, and it only reports 99% max...

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I've set max processor usage to 99.99% instead of 100.0%. Let's see what happens. Should, in theory, force exactly the kind of system pause that I described, regardless of what pathological priority gets set.

How well it works depends on what their code thinks "99.99%" means. For all I know, they're getting CPU usage from a system call, and it only reports 99% max...

You might want to think about it being slightly lower. 99.99% would free up one second out of every 10,000, or one about ever 4 hours.

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BOINC WIKI