Quick question: Is there a way to automate setting the priority down to the lowest priority under windows of all boinc programs? I can do it by hand but I suspect the program is resetting them back to normal priority. (Windows 7 x64). TIA!

I've set it to only use 5% of the cpu but be on all of the time. This is not the same as saying just set it to the lowest priority. But I guess I can live with it. :-)

Quick question: Is there a way to automate setting the priority down to the lowest priority under windows of all boinc programs? I can do it by hand but I suspect the program is resetting them back to normal priority. (Windows 7 x64). TIA!

GPU tasks must run normal priority. CPU tasks should be running at low priority.
Why? GPU tasks have to be responsive enough to get out of the way when you want to use the GPU to look at the screen.
The manager also needs to run at normal priority as it must respond to RPC's from the tasks. But it hardly uses any resources at all.

If you you screw too much by hand with task priorities you can cause a priority inversion and freeze BOINC or your system.

Perhaps a better thing for you is too look at the setting to sleep BOINC if you are using the computer.

When you say you've set the CPU to use only 5% which of the many setting of CPU usage do you mean?

If you set usage to 5% of the cores that will restrict BOINC to directly using one core on you 8-core processor (BOINC cannot allocate a fraction of a core using this technique).
If you set 5% of the time then that is not a very good idea as the time slice is very small and what may happen is that the operating system will spend more time loading and unloading the application and its data than the the application actually runs for. Further doing this increases the thermal stress on the chip as it is continuously cycling between states.

As Gary says trying to set the priorities is a hard & fruitless task - BOINC is designed and written in the way it is to try to maintain system response while doing a reasonable amount of work in the background.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

I would suggest not using the iGPU (Intel inbuilt GPU) for crunching. The CPU cores themselves could produce much more work than it is able to produce.


Edit- and for running Seti, using video driver v431.60 or earlier, or v442.19 or later (if Win7 is supported) is necessary to avoid issues with some WU (Work Units) erroring out on your Nvidia card.
Ta Wiggo.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Edit- and for running Seti, using video driver v431.60 or earlier, or v442.19 or later (if Win7 is supported) is necessary to avoid issues with some WU (Work Units) erroring out on your Nvidia card.

Actually Grant that driver problem is a Win10 only problem as earlier Windows versions arn't effected by it.

Cheers.

hi, u can use utility programs like bill's process manager / process lasso etc etc

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@ Mark Manning

Quick question: Is there a way to automate setting the priority down to the lowest priority under windows of all boinc programs?

Yes, documented here

" The OS process priority at which tasks are run. Values are 0 (lowest priority, the default), 1 (below normal), 2 (normal), 3 (above normal), 4 (high) and 5 (real-time - not recommended). 'special' process priority is used for coprocessor (GPU) applications, wrapper applications, and non-compute-intensive applications, 'process priority' for all others. The two options can be used independently."

<cc_config>
<options>
<process_priority>N</process_priority>
<process_priority_special>N</process_priority_special>
</options>
</cc_config>

EDIT: Does NOT control any Virtualbox processes.