I/O, memory priority reduction of tasks

Boomman
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Topic 196096

Got redirected here with this question:

In Windows there's also a Memory priority and I/O priority. I used an online guide to get those lowered for uTorrent process, and it seems the program become less noticeable when ran in the background.
Screenshot of BOINC spawned process and my adjusted uTorrent process

I just wanted to ask, what is a reason not to apply these low priorities to BOINC processes too?

Bernd Machenschalk
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I/O, memory priority reduction of tasks

This is more a general BOINC question, not specific to Einstein@Home, right?

BM

BM

Claggy
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RE: This is more a general

Quote:

This is more a general BOINC question, not specific to Einstein@Home, right?

BM


Ageless redirected the Question here from the Boinc Forum:

I/O, memory priority reduction of BOINC

Claggy

Jord
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It's not "High priority" that

It's not "High priority" that he's talking about, it's about the priority at which the application runs under the OS.

The Gamma-ray pulsar v0.23 that he's pointing at is your application. If it runs at Normal priority in Windows, it's your doing, as you compile the application to run at a certain priority. That isn't anything to do with BOINC, other than that BOINC may ask of the projects to use Low priority on CPU apps.

Richard Haselgrove
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RE: It's not "High

Quote:

It's not "High priority" that he's talking about, it's about the priority at which the application runs under the OS.

The Gamma-ray pulsar v0.23 that he's pointing at is your application. If it runs at Normal priority in Windows, it's your doing, as you compile the application to run at a certain priority. That isn't anything to do with BOINC, other than that BOINC may ask of the projects to use Low priority on CPU apps.


It's even more complicated than that. Under Windows, at least, the separate threads within an application can have different priorities:

Oliver hit a problem (BRP3/4) with those around this time last year (that's the before-fix version in the screenshot), and we sorted it out over boinc_dev.

From what Boomman says, it might be possible to extend the principle to I/O and memory priorities, as well as the threads we're already controlling. But given the amount of data which the Einstein apps have to process, I'm wondering whether lowering those priorities would mean the app takes too much of a performance hit. uTorrent, if I understand it right, would be limited to WAN speeds anyway, so doesn't need the sort of performance a scientific CPU or GPU app would need.

Boomman
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This document outlines new

This document outlines new I/O priorities implemented in Vista.

Quote:
I/O prioritization improves the responsiveness of the system without significantly decreasing the throughput of the system.


One of the examples of program that would need I/O prioritization:

Quote:
A background task might attempt to do work that is not time critical and should not interfere with the user’s foreground tasks.

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