Hi,

I have been noticing this issue for a while now and I wanted to know if anyone else sees this, and more importantly, if there is anything I can do about it.

I have a quad core machine with 4G of memory and an Nvidia GeForce GT520 in the system. All four CPU cores are configured to run SETI and I have my preferences set to run two Cuda processes at a time on the GPU. I.e. a total of 6 SETI/Cuda process at once.

With the system monitor running (it only monitors the CPUs), the four CPUs are running ~98 - 100% utilization, and memory usage is ~1.5G of the 4G available. No swap space is being used.

If I open a browser window, essentially no effect is seen in CPU usage (I would expect that), and the memory usage increases to 1.5, or 1.6G. Still well less than half of the available system memory.

The problem is that if I browse for a while and then forget to close the browser for several hours, my credits earned when displayed the following day will be significantly lower as a percentage. For instance, if the machine is otherwise idle for 24 hours, I might get 5500 credits. If I leave a browser open for 24 hours, my score might only be 3500 - 4000 which is a drop of 25-35% or thereabouts.

Note that when the browser is 'open', it is not running any videos, or even applets as far as I can tell. The image is static, and memory usage drops only minimally.

Because the CPU and memory usage seem to be so minimally impacted, I feel that having an open browser has to be affecting the GPU in some way, but I can't figure out how. How is displaying a static image in the browser any different than displaying the static image of the desktop?

Can anyone explain this? Any way to lessen the effect on my score if I forget and leave a browser window open?

Thanks in advance,
Jon

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if you are on a website your browser is actively receiving and sending info to that site. Much of that info is ads from the sites you have open. Even though the this doesn't actually use much network time it does use a bit of CPU and GPU to process and update website/ad content.

IIRC one of our users actually found that just having the BOINC manager open on your desktop slows the processes down by a percent or so over time.

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

Check for the option of hardware acceleration in your browsers preferences, uncheck it if checked.

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