Helo friends, while malariacontrol project is running on WUs, there is too much disk activity on my pc. Is it normal or is there something wrong? It makes my pc very slow, if it continues I will stop running this project.
My PC specs:
AMD Phenom II x4 925
2 GB Ram
Windows XP SP3
40 GB HDD.
Thanks for the answer and tips if there is.
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Helo friends, while malariacontrol project is running on WUs, there is too much disk activity on my pc. Is it normal or is there something wrong? It makes my pc very slow, if it continues I will stop running this project.
My PC specs:
AMD Phenom II x4 925
2 GB Ram
Windows XP SP3
40 GB HDD.
Thanks for the answer and tips if there is.
Go into the Boinc Manager, the icon by the clock, by doing a right click on it then a left click on Open Boinc Manager. Then go to Advanced, Preferences, then the disk and memory usage tab. In there you will see a line that says "Tasks checkpoint to disk every ___ seconds". Change the number in there to something like 900, which is 15 minutes, and your machine should write to the drive less often. This means though that if your pc crashes you will lose up to 15 minutes of crunching time when it reboots. You will need to click ok at the bottom of the page to save the changes, if you make some changes you don't like just click cancel instead. The default setting is 60, as in once a minute, so yes the machine is always writing to the hard drive.
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Sounds more likely your system is running out of RAM and starting to page memory. OpenMalaria does use a lot of RAM, and 2GB of memory is probably not enough if you run OpenMalaria on all four cores at the same time. Probably makes sense if either you limit BOINC to just 2 cores or you switch to another project requiring less RAM, since if your system is paging memory it will slow everything down a lot. You can see in the task manager -> resources tab whether or not it's paging memory.
(Although I don't want to have to say go away and find another project, it is definitely better to work on one thing efficiently than another which slows your whole computer down).
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I am running malaria with the same problem. I´ve got 4GB of ram, so it is not the problem. I have tried to decrease the "write to disk" time, with no success.
My specs are:
i3
4GB RAM
Win7
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I am running malaria with the same problem. I´ve got 4GB of ram, so it is not the problem. I have tried to decrease the "write to disk" time, with no success.
My specs are:
i3
4GB RAM
Win7
NO don't decrease the time...increase the time!!! Change it from the default of every 60 seconds to something like 900 seconds, 15 minutes. You can also change how long it crunches for one project before switching to another project so that it sort of corresponds with how long a unit takes to run. That is also done in the Boinc Manager under Advanced, Preferences, processor usage and then near the bottom of the page. This will be very difficult if one project takes 3 hours and another takes 2 hours though.
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I am sorry, of course I meant that I have increased the time with no success. The activity remained the same.
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I am sorry, of course I meant that I have increased the time with no success. The activity remained the same.
I thought you might have meant that but wanted to make sure. Hmmm I am not sure then what is causing it. Have you scanned for viruses and malware lately? Malware can cause lots of disk activity as it reports on everything you do, I like the program http://malwarebytes.org/ and use the free version. The free version is exactly the same as the full but requires you to manually do the updates and do the scans. I update it and run it about once a month and that seems to work for me.
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Sorry matob, I'm not sure. You can confirm nothing else is happening in the background (windows update, virus scan, etc.)?
Edit: do automatic windows updates in the background count as malware, mikey?
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Sorry matob, I'm not sure. You can confirm nothing else is happening in the background (windows update, virus scan, etc.)?
Edit: do automatic windows updates in the background count as malware, mikey?
SOMETIMES!!
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The other thing to look at is your "Switch between applications every" and "Leave applications in memory while suspended" preferences.
My C2Q Q6600 XP system has 2GB of memory and I keep applications in memory. I've found that there's a lot of disk access when BOINC reschedules MCDN tasks and some can have a long delay before they start making progress (the longest I've observed was 5 minutes on a task which had already run for 4 hours with an 80 minute switch period). Once the task is running I don't notice any performance problems with a 5 minute checkpoint interval. I've not tried running with LAIM disabled so can't say if the same happens in that case.
If you have a low switch period the start up time could be a significant overhead.
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Hi,
I am sure that the disc activity is caused by malaria. I have tracked it in the resources manager. There is nothing running in the background. However, the disc activity remains for a while after I switch the boinc manager off. So this fact give me the troubles... I´ve stopped running malaria after few WUs and I am running other projects now without any problem...
Thanks for your activity guys :)
PS: Of course I have the "leave apps in memory while suspended" option turned on and "switch between apps" is at default 60mins.
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Openmalaria still writes checkpoints every so often (another BOINC setting), which can be large. And as you've seen, BOINC doesn't necessarily terminate applications immediately (I don't know the details, but it probably waits until they've finished checkpointing).
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On multicores, do not use more than two. At last I found the cause of the problem. When multicore malaria running each wu's forces my cpu (at least what I am thinking of, something like that or it may be wrong) to write hdd constantly.
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On multicores, do not use more than two. At last I found the cause of the problem. When multicore malaria running each wu's forces my cpu (at least what I am thinking of, something like that or it may be wrong) to write hdd constantly.
Sorry, I do not understand what you are trying to say...
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Well, only running two instances of OpenMalaria on a quad core is one way to reduce disk usage, certainly.
(Note: on my laptop (dual-core + hyperthreading), running two jobs at once appears to be ideal: it uses most of the CPU power available, while leaving a little slack CPU for other jobs and not causing excessive memory usage.)
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Thanks for the tips and advices.
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It's caused by gzstream, used for the checkpoints and on multiprocessor hyperthreaded Xeons under windows it is a real application killer, together with the heartbeat "feature" of BOINC.
As soon as more than one concurrent Malaria WU writes the checkpoints, the complete machine becomes unresponsive and the core client stops doing anything - this includes writing the heartbeat timestamp into the shared memory.
As all results (all projects, not just Malaria!) crash due to this unresponsiveness, they all are restarted synchronous, which makes the impact of the Malaria WUs even worse. From that moment, each and every Malaria checkpoint leads to "no heartbeat from core client" for all BOINC tasks.
The only way to stop this hazardous misbehaviour is to stop all Malaria WUs and let them finish one by one.
edit : I'm not too familiar with gzstream, maybe it could be parametrized to use only the own thread for compression, which would reduce the impact on other applications
edit2 : Or just ditch gzstream and write the stuff uncompressed, it has only a 50% compression rate anyway so it doesn't save too much - too much trouble for saving 100MB HDD storage.
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