A) I've noticed that two computers with boincmgr 7.6.31 show tasks still running via ps -eaf when
boincmgr says they are suspended. (dseti3,q2) q2 has an old GPU and is running the GNU driver so
boinc sees no known graphics card. dseti3 has two nvidia 760's.

B) Two others with boincmgr 7.6.31 show no tasks running with ps -eaf when boincmgr
says they are suspended.

C) Two others with boincmgr 7.9.3 show no tasks running with ps -eaf when boincmgr
says they are suspended

The command in all cases is ps -eaf | grep projects
I don't understand why case A) exists at all.
A typical output of the ps with case A machines, all boinc projects suspended
using :
Dseti3 1999: ps -eaf |grep projects
boinc 5765 5536 86 15:54 ? 01:59:25 ../../projects/setiathome.berkeley.edu/setiathome_8.00_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu

What started this was the desire to know how many project tasks were running.
For case A) machines I've not been able to see how to always count them correctly.

Suspended via
boinccmd --set_gpu_mode never
boinccmd --set_run_mode never

Interpretations? Suggestions?
Thanks in advance.

I cant address your question directly but wanted to give your post a bump. If you are not already familiar 'htop' is an amazing interactive process viewer for the terminal. You can user it to filter, sort and kill processes.

Please check if the processes are really running. That they are listed by ps means they still exist, but they may also be sleeping (there are options in Boinc to keep processes in memory while suspended). You should run ps multiple times to check if the amount of CPU time used increases or use a program like top that will show you information about all processes (by default ordered by CPU usage).

Tom

I'm not used to seeing boinc processes (setiathome) suspended
and hanging around in memory.

My largest machine 12*2 cores (the *2 as hyperthreading is on)
currently shows 35 processes, 19 seti, 16
einstein. Boinc computer-options of boincmgr
is set to use 82% of the cores.

Other machines (only seti at present) only show what
is actually running.

htop is very useful, but I have not even scratched the
surface of what one can do with it...

Where will I find the options about keeping/not keeping
suspended processes in memory?

I found the option to Leave non-GPU tasks in memory while suspended in the BOINC Manager. In advanced view, under Options -> Computing preferences -> Disk and memory.

Thanks for that reference. I found that checkbox and unchecked it!
DavidA