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Forums » Tech and Talk » Computing Clubs » Team Discovery » [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity
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HiVolt
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[WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity


Usage when first started
 

Usage after 5 seconds running
 
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How long it takes per WU

CPU Benchmark
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Machine Specs
I've got a new 8 Core 2.8 Xeon Mac Pro here at work for a week or so now. Of course I loaded BOINC on it, and I expected it to crunch like a horse... However, something's not right...

Whenever I start Boinc, the CPU usage spikes to full on all 8 cores, but 5 seconds later it drops and settles to 84-85%. I've deleted, reinstalled BOINC, and it continues to do this. The work units take a very long time per core. There is no other process eating up any CPU time. I have another Mac Pro except it'a 4-core, and it purrs along fine at full cpu load.

Attached are some screenshots.

Any help would be appreciated.
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1 edit

Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

I'd like to say maybe the project assumes you have a strong beast of a computer & so is sending you the hardest work units to find cures...but I'm sure that's not it

I'm not familiar w/ Macs so I can't help..maybe we have a member that uses one that can assist?

Congrats on your new machine, Martin
I'm sure there's a reason & you'll find it.

... can always ask at WCG forums as well (in Boinc Support), if no one here figures it out

»www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forum···forum=83

Edit: maybe ajeb See Profile can help?

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2 edits
Sounds like some kinda throttling, yes?

Just some food for thought...

Does the cpu speed reduce simultaneously with the cpu percentage? Any change in temperature? Any change in multiplier?
--Disable intel speedstep?

I know nothing about a mac, does it have an internal bios throttle like...
Biostar has....cool & quiet
Gigabyte has....C1e (enhanced halt)
Asus has....Same, I think (I would have to look)

I think TD member Ajeb has that same machine, perhaps he can help?

EDIT: Another thought. Could that machine have defaulted to a boinc setting that allows a lesser cpu percentage. I have had that happen to me before. You might check the maximum CPU percentage usage setting in wcg/boinc?
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HiVolt
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Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

The Mac has no configurable options like PC boards do... I have done a video encoding test and all 8 cores are fully utilized, so it's not something related to the machine.

I have checked BOINC throttling in the options, and it's set to use 100% cpu and all the processor cores.
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HiVolt
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Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

I've PM'd ajeb See Profile, hopefully he has a couple of minutes to take a look.

Thanks!
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Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

Hey,
I've had my MAC PRO for about a month.

I'm running near 100% on all eight cores.

Check your energy saving panel. WCG runs at a very low priority. Just running BOINC in not enough to keep the computer from going to sleep, so make sure the computer is in "never" going to sleep and uncheck "Put hard drives to sleep.."

The hard drive thing was slowing me down when I started up.

I'm also running a different version of BOINC than you. I'm still on 5.10.45, I always wait a bit to upgrade to make sure the bugs are worked out.

Hope that helps. FYI..Getting about a 4300 RAC on the machine and that spec is still climbing.

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Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

Thanks... I already had the sleep settings disabled, and it doesn't seem to make a difference if they are on or off here.

Anyway, I just ran Activity Monitor and it seems that at the exact time the CPU load drops to from 100 to 85, the System percentage goes up. I dont know what that means though.

Attached is the graph. Green is User %, Red is System %.
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4 edits

Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

I'm assuming you've shown yourself "all processes" and not just "my processes" to see if something else is taking up the other 15%.

Also what happens if you open a 9th crunching instance (if you can do such a thing)?

There is also uncertainty principle in monitoring this usage but it shouldn't be anywhere near 15%. In my quad activity monitor for example takes 1.5% typically.
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Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

Skeedatl is right...that 15% is going somewhere into the system. You should be able to find in all processes. There was a huge system update just released..is it downloading in background? Though I can't see that taking up that much cpu.

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Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

This happened before the 10.5.5 also. I have looked under All Processes, and I don't see it. Here's a screenshot.
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Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

And here's output from "top" in terminal.


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Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

Next time run "top -o cpu" to sort highest CPU processes first.

Might want to check the 'nice' level of BOINC client and renice if possible. I've never understood the Mac OS X process scheduler, and there is a website with some good info (believe it is Amit Singh of Google).

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Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

said by bbarrera See Profile :

Might want to check the 'nice' level of BOINC client and renice if possible. I've never understood the Mac OS X process scheduler, and there is a website with some good info (believe it is Amit Singh of Google).
Can you explain how do I go about doing that?
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4 edits

Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

»www.macosxhints.com/article.php?···85034927

I've also see a few utilities in my Google search like BeNicer »www.versiontracker.com/dyn/morei···sx/16534 that claim to make the process a bit quicker.

EDIT - Just toyed with BeNicer and it may not like Leo...I get some errors and VT showed it only supported Tiger and earlier.
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Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

This can't be this hard...lol.

I'm running 99.3% to 100% on all eight cores. My process list looks the same as yours. The only thing seems to be that I'm using an older version of BOINC.

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Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

said by ajeb See Profile :

This can't be this hard...lol.

I'm running 99.3% to 100% on all eight cores. My process list looks the same as yours. The only thing seems to be that I'm using an older version of BOINC.
I was running the same version of BOINC before, it was doing the same thing, so I downloaded the latest...

Now, I've been thinking a bit... When I got this new 8-Core Mac Pro, I was upgrading my main workstation from a 4-Core Mac Pro that was moved to another part of the office... Now, All I did was move the hard drive over, it booted right up and I didn't think anything of it. Everything else has been working fine.

Could the Kernel or something else not be handling the 8-cores properly because of this, and not letting a low priority process like BOINC access 100% of the cores when the system is idle?

Could an archive & install from the DVD's that came with the 8-Core (10.5.4) do the trick perhaps?
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Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

Try downloading the combo update for 10.5.5 which just came out yesterday. Perhaps there will be some magic in there for ya.
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Your using all cores so the system knows they're there. I can't see why the kernel would be written to handle them all.

How about the EFI firmware update?

»support.apple.com/kb/HT1237

Repair permission?

»www.macworld.com/article/52220/2···ons.html

Just throwing out things now...lol.

I've been reading message boards for other projects using MAC and compiled a list of the stupid things.

Are you using local preferences or web preferences? Things seem to run better for most with setting the preferences on the website of the project not locally. I set that up using the custom option of device profile on the WCG website. I have two profiles, one for my MAC, the other for my PCs. I found that Protein folding took forever to run and blocked it running on the MAC.

Screen saver set to never?
Run always in activity pull down?

I'll keep looking.

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Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

What i'll do when I have some free time is to install a fresh OS copy on a spare hard drive... I have a feeling it's got something to do with me just transferring the hard drive from the old Mac Pro.
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1 edit

Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

Well, I had some free time today at work so I installed a clean copy of Leopard 10.5.4 (that came with the new Mac Pro). After installation, the first thing I did was Install Boinc...

After running the test benchmarks at 100% on all 8 cores, once all 8 work units of HCC populated the spots, it dropped down from 100% to 85%.

I'm at a loss for words. Is this beast of a machine simply not cut out for crunching? I don't get it...

Edit: I also have XP Pro installed on this machine, and I just rebooted into it and installed Boinc, and it's happily crunching on all 8 cores. WTF is wrong with the Mac version?
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said by HiVolt See Profile :

I have checked BOINC throttling in the options, and it's set to use 100% cpu and all the processor cores.
Checked it on the client options (not the website), right?
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Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

said by Dersgniw See Profile :

said by HiVolt See Profile :

I have checked BOINC throttling in the options, and it's set to use 100% cpu and all the processor cores.
Checked it on the client options (not the website), right?
Yep! I'm somehow thinking the BOINC version for Mac is not that 8-core friendly... on the 4-core Mac running the exact same OS it works perfectly.
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glennaxl
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Have you checked this?
System Prefs
->Energy Saver
->Options
->Processor Performance

It should be set to "Highest".

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Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

said by glennaxl See Profile :

Have you checked this?
System Prefs
->Energy Saver
->Options
->Processor Performance

It should be set to "Highest".
Pretty sure I did, but I don't think there is such an option on a Mac Pro, only on the laptops or imacs/minis.

I'll double check tomorrow though.
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2 edits
Great suggestions everyone!

And thanks glennaxl See Profile & ajeb See Profile

..your "things to check" on Macs are now added to our FAQ

»Team Discovery WCG BOINC FAQ »[Macs] How to Make Sure You're Running at Peak Efficiency

Edit: Let me know if there's anything else

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The MAC OS is based on UNIX, UNIX has an automatic process that will "nice" down any long running processes to stop them from taking over all processing, thus starving out other processes.

By "nice" I mean that the system will assign a lower priority to the process.

In UNIX all you would have to do is re-nice the process to a -1 and it would be ignored by the system.

Since I am NOT familiar with the MAC OS, I have no clue how you might change the process priority...

I hope this helps...
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Like glennaxl suggested, all a search turns up for me is:

System Prefs
->Energy Saver
->Options
->Processor Performance

What happens when you set BOINC to only use 85%? What about 50%? What happens when you tell it to only use 4 cores?
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Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

said by Dersgniw See Profile :

Like glennaxl suggested, all a search turns up for me is:

System Prefs
->Energy Saver
->Options
->Processor Performance

What happens when you set BOINC to only use 85%? What about 50%? What happens when you tell it to only use 4 cores?
There is no processor performance settings on the Mac Pro in the Energy Saver preferences.

When I set only 4 cores to crunch, they operate at 96%. When I set the cores to operate at 50%, they operate at 43%.

I tried both the 5.10.45 client from WCG site as well as the latest 6.2.18 from Boinc site directly. Both behave identical.
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Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

Have you tried HPF2 or any other project just to see if it's specifically the HCC project?

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Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

said by Dersgniw See Profile :

Have you tried HPF2 or any other project just to see if it's specifically the HCC project?
Good idea, I tried creating a profile with HPF2 only and assigned it to the machine. I reset the project and it only downloaded HCC WU's.

Does it take some time to kick in?
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Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

You'd have to abort or suspend your WU's then get an update.

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Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

said by Dersgniw See Profile :

You'd have to abort or suspend your WU's then get an update.
I reset the project, it cleared & downloaded new ones... isnt that the same thing?
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Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

Well I'll be a monkey's uncle! It's HCC that's screwy on this Mac. Once HPF2's loaded up they are crunching at full capacity!

Thanks a lot for the suggestion, Brian!!! I would never have guessed it.
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Re: [WCG] 8 Core Xeon not crunching at full capacity

said by HiVolt See Profile :

Well I'll be a JoJo's uncle! It's HCC that's screwy on this Mac. Once HPF2's loaded up they are crunching at full capacity!

Neat-o (I think)

Well..we are both projects, Martin...so w00t

»Team Discovery WCG BOINC FAQ »Help Fight Childhood Cancer, Help Conquer Cancer, HPF2 - Which is for me
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1 edit
You should post a link to this at the HCC forum - »www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forum···orum=301 - if you don't want to, I can.
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See 7 replies to this post

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»www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forum···ad=21979
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