I find that with some projects / WU's that having the WU only running on one core causes it to run faster.

And my computer also for whatever reason seems a bit more stable and responsive when it's set properly.

So my request would be for the BOINC manager to set the affinity when it launches the apps to work on the WU's.

I was actually rather surprised to see that it was not being done when I checked. So if anyone knows why, that would be interesting to know as well (Well if there is a real reason for it).

I'm not sure I understand the request. Every workunit is assigned a CPU automatically. If you only want to run one core, then change your processor preference to 1 so that BOINC will only use a single core at all times.

The slowdown from using multiple cores usually comes from the fact that both cores have to fight for RAM access, however the slowdown is usually minimal compared to completing two workunits at the same time, which is why many people prefer to run workunits on every core.

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The experiment was done recently, and there is no difference on most hardware/OS combinations if CPU affinity is set. On the very few that there was a difference, it was actually slightly faster if no CPU affinity is set. Given the above information, it is unlikely to happen.

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BOINC WIKI

The experiment was done recently, and there is no difference on most hardware/OS combinations if CPU affinity is set. On the very few that there was a difference, it was actually slightly faster if no CPU affinity is set. Given the above information, it is unlikely to happen.

Hmmmm... Perhaps it was just what was going on with my computer at the time then. As it seemed to go a bit faster with the affinity set. If some fairly good testing was done on it, I can't argue with that though :)

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The experiment was done recently, and there is no difference on most hardware/OS combinations if CPU affinity is set. On the very few that there was a difference, it was actually slightly faster if no CPU affinity is set. Given the above information, it is unlikely to happen.

Setting affinity on linux/unix based OSes is not a good idea. The linux kernel does good on sheduling the threads. On windows it's the other way around. ;)

So adding affinity on windows is a good thing to prevent process "hopping".

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