NO COMPUTATION WHEN SCREENSAVER IS ON
25 Jul 2005 6:32:15 UTC
Topic 189600
(moderation:
WHY DOES MY WORK RUN NORMALY UNTILL THE SCREENSAVER COMES ON AND THEN THE PROGRESS % STOPS INCREASING ?
IF I KEEP THE SCREENSAVER FROM COMING ON BY MOVING THE MOUSE OR HITTING A KEY THE % COMPLEATE KEEPS COUNTING UP STEADILY BUT ELSE IT JUST STOPS.
NO COMPUTATION WHEN SCREENSAVER IS ON
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Screensavers are notorious for using a lot of CPU power. If you are running any distributed computing project, it is best to not use a screensaver. How much CPU power the screensaver will take depends on your hardware, graphics card, CPU, etc. It is not unusual for a screensaver to use a minimum of 20%, and it can on some machines go upwards of 80-90% of the CPU's resources. A lot will depend on the screensaver itself, and how complicated it is.
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it is the boink screensaver,
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it is the boink screensaver, and it is not the graffics, i display the graffics all the time in a window.
it is some kind of bug in einstein. this does not happen with the seti work units.
It seems that you are not
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It seems that you are not using an OpenGL-accelerated graphics card, so the main CPU has to do all the rendering, keeping it from crunching. There should be an entry in the FAQ list.
BM
BM
RE: it is the boink
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The BOINC "screensaver" is mostly shell that hooks into the science applications full screen graphics. If you see a rotating star sphere then its the E@H app producing the graphics. And, repeating what Shaktai said, on some machines it uses a lot of CPU resources. A description of the screensaver is here (thats from the E@H home page).
You can see just how much CPU is consumed by the graphics with ProcessExplorer from SysInternals. Run it, double click the einstein_4_79_windows_x86.exe line, select the "threads" tab and watch the threads. You'll see three threads, with only one showing CPU usage. Watch it for a while, at least 10 seconds or so.
Then switch to boincmgr and "show graphics". Switch back to Process Explorer and watch the three threads, you should see two threads using a lot of CPU, or the second thread taking most of it. That second one is the graphics thread, it shows how much is stolen from the computation thread. And since the graphics is just in a window, full-screen graphics will use even more.
But besides the CPU usage, theres another very good reason to not display the graphics.
Your WU's all show "client error", ending with 0xC0000005. That happens with certain display cards, mostly ATI or Intel, but not limited to them. Try running for a while without displaying the graphics - set the screensaver to "none" or "blank", don't "show graphics". See if WU's complete without error.
While you have Process Explorer running, check which DLL/module is at 0x7C911430. The bottom pane shows the modules loaded for the selected process, make sure you have the E@H process selected and press ctrl-d if you see handles instead of modules.
Check thru the module list to see which one has that address, you need to display the "base address" and "size" columns for this: add columns to the display by clicking "View", "Select Columns", the "DLL" tab and make sure "Name", "Description", "Base Address" and "Mapped Size" are checked.
Sort the display by clicking the "Base" header. Then look thru the list of addresses to see which one has 0x7C911430. When you find it, double click the module to pop up a properties dialog, switch to the "version" tab and write it down. The module info would be helpful - line from PE and the version from the modules properties.