Severe latency with new I7 960 (and old Q6600)
17 Apr 2011 7:32:02 UTC
Topic 195756
(moderation:
I need some help here guys. I've been doing E@H for a long time now and only recently, last year or so, have I been experiencing this problem.
If I'm booted up and BOINC is running in the background, and nothing else is running that I've started, I will then open up a game, such as Spider Solotaire. While playing the game, the computer will freeze and after about 15 secs all will resume. On my recently replaced Q6600, if I put the GPU's to sleep, I could play the game and have no freezes. Once I turn the gpu's back on, delays would happen. So... long story short, I blew up the Q6600 mobo and replaced it with a new Gigabyte board. That of course required a new proc and memory which I was able to buy at Fry's with no interest for one year.
Jump forward a week or so and the system is up and running, but the latency sometimes is awful! I find that with the I7 and having Hyper-Threading turned on, I have to put not only the gpu's to sleep, but also the cpu's, just to play a simple little game without freezes. Something's wrong.
But there's more. I wound up having to reinstall W7 Pro after botching the first boot after the new board was put in. OK, it probably needed it anyway. But there is a driver problem somewhere. Many times now I have blue screened. I did a lot of investigating and as it turns out, 3 of the last 5 BSOD's were based on an nVidia file. I'm using driver ver 266.58, supposedly released recently. But I'm thinking the previous driver version was bad too, because I ran it for so long with no problem other than what I mentioned above.
Anyway, I get the BSOD's and it wipes out my onboard ethernet controller. Windows won;t even see it. When that happens I have to run a program from Realtek to install their network driver, and then reboot. During the boot cycle, I then have to shut off and clear the BIOS. This is the only way to get the ethernet controller seen again. I reset all of the BIOS settings, and then let the system boot into Windows.
The controller will be seen and I'll get my internet access back.
The end result is that I have installed and reinstalled just about everything, from the OS all the way up to individual drivers and most of my favorite software. I haven't BSOD'd in about 24 hrs. That was when I reinstalled the video driver.
Latency has been the issue I've been focusing on today. BOINC is/was running on all 8 cores. It's off at the minute so I can type this. W7 still can't see the onboard USB 3.0 controller. A driver was installed for it, but it fails to load as Event Viewer states.
I adjusted my settings for E@H to use only 6 cores max, but so far it's still running on 8. I'll wait and see what happens after 2 of them complete.
I'm no rookie when it comes to building, maintaining and troubleshooting PC's, but this has got me vexed. Even with my knowledgebase, there's many of you out there who are waaaaaay smarter about this stuff than me, and I gratefully appeal to you for some help.
Severe latency with new I7 960 (and old Q6600)
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You'll have to restart the BOINC client for that setting to take effect, and see to it that you changed the correct preferences (local preferences override the online ones).
Gruß,
Gundolf
Computer sind nicht alles im Leben. (Kleiner Scherz)
I've rebooted a dozen or so
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I've rebooted a dozen or so times since your post and it's still running on 8 cores and causing major latency across everything that runs on this PC.
Sounds like you didn't tell
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Sounds like you didn't tell BOINC to use only 6 cores. IT should be something like "on multiprocessors use at most 90% of the CPUs". Wich would give you 7 threads, anything between 87.5% and 75% would give you 6 threads.
Using a half-way modern BOINC these settings can be changed on the fly, no BOINC restart or reboot necessary.
MrS
Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002
RE: Using a half-way modern
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Not when using the local advanced preferences, no. But when the online preferences are used, one would at least need to make BOINC aware of the new preferences: BOINC Manager->Advanced view->Projects tab->Select Einstein->click Update.
RE: I've rebooted a dozen
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It also depends where you are making the changes this time, and where you have made changes in the past.
If you make changes on the project website, then you have to allow BOINC to communicate with the project at least once before they take effect. Work fetch, work report, or a single click on the Manager's 'Update' button will be enough.
But if you have ever changed so much as one value using BOINC Manager itself, not amount of fiddling on the website will make the slightest difference. Look for "Reading preferences override file" in your startup messages - if it appears, you must change any more settings in BOINC Manager, or use BM's 'clear' button to revert to the website version.
Having said that, MrS is right - whichever set is active, "on multiprocessors use at most..." is the setting to change.
I used the online setting of
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I used the online setting of an actual number of processors. Not the percentage one. I interpreted that as use whatever percentage out of 100 for each individual processor, which is why I went with the option above it "Use at most x processors". I will try your option though. Thanks.