Low CPU & Memory Usage

Anonymous
Topic 10707

Hi, since you didn't tell us which kernel you're using, let me guess:
it's a 2.6 flavour. Right? Don't worry, even if there is a Sleeping or
Zombie process, only trust the entry in your client_state.xml

Look at the output of "top" (command line version), in the summary lines you
should have a quite high "nice" percentage value.

Steffen Grunewald, for Merlin/Morgane
Steffen Grunewa...
Joined: 18 Oct 04
Posts: 50
Credit: 538,216,237
RAC: 561,947

Low CPU & Memory Usage

> Using 2.6.8 kernel, Mandrake 10.1 upgraded to KDE 3.3.2, boinc 4.15, E@H 4.69.

Ah, this at least explains the somewhat strange numbers. More below...

> What wu times should I expect on this 400 Mhz PII?

On a 2200+ Athlon, it would now take about 12000 CPU seconds. So for you
I'd guess about 10-20 times longer (processor efficiencies scale badly between
PentiumII and P4/Athlon families) resulting in some 35-70 hours...

> Tasks: 84 total, 1 running, 83 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 2.6% us, 1.0% sy, 96.4% ni, 0.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si

It's the 95+% nice that's doing your BOINC, even if you don't see it below.

Look for a einstein* process at the end (with idle on)

> H1_0050.9__0051.0_0.1_T02_Test02 Project : einstein
> State : being computed CPU Time : 17h 48min
> Progress : 26.54%
>
> Which is about 70 hours for the above wu. Is this typical? Would rather have
> E@H make better use of the resources than giving it more time. E@H seems to
> be running much slower than S@H, typically 16 hrs per wu and at the top of the
> "top" listing:)

E@H *is* already using your resources. And for your CPU about 70 hours appear
to be perfectly OK...

Bruce Allen
Bruce Allen
Joined: 15 Oct 04
Posts: 958
Credit: 170,849,008
RAC: 0

Please see the following. It

Please see the following. It applies to us because Einstein@Home is a multi-threaded application.

http://procps.sourceforge.net/faq.html

Question: Why is %CPU underreported for multi-threaded (Java, etc.) apps?

Answer: You need to upgrade to the 2.6.10 kernel at least. Older kernels do not provide a reasonable way to get this information.

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