Laptop on a go-slow?

[MmmSkyscraper]

Yesterday I noticed my laptop is taking approximately 16 hours to complete a WU That's four times longer than it used to be, yet the A64 is producing them in the usual time of 2 hours so it's not a change in the way WU's are calculated...

I had to format the machine anyway so figured I'd reinstall BOINC and see what happened. Still taking just as long. I've set the power scheme to always on and rebooted but again no change. Nothing new hardware-wise, no relevant event log messages and it's always run SP1 cos SP2 won't install without crashing.

Edit: The machine is dedicated to crunching, it's running a P4 (non-HT).

Any ideas?

 

[CyGoR]

If it is a mobile P4 CPU, it might be running at a lower speed due to speedstep. When going to the 'Properties' of 'This Computer' you can see the current speed of the CPU (or use a program like cpuZ).
That's all I can think of..

 

[MmmSkyscraper]

Thanks, I checked with the Properties dialog and CPU-ID. Both report 3.06 GHz... Downloaded SpeedswitchXP to check the performance settings and it's set for maximum. I'll look in the BIOS and see if there's anything funky going on there.

Edit: done that, nothing seems to have changed. Speedstep is definitely disabled in the BIOS. Think I'll try installing the latest BOINC (4.14?) and seeing if that shakes things up.

 

[Rattledagger]

Latest is v4.16.

Being a laptop, any problems with high temperatures slowing down the cpu?
Anything wrong with the settings, like maybe disabled cache-memory?

The time... is this cpu-time or run-time? Is something else eating many of the cycles, check in task manager.

 

[MmmSkyscraper]

It always runs a bit hot when crunching but I've got it elevated off the desk so air can circulate... It's been at the same temperatures before and produced a WU in 4 hours. I looked in the BIOS, there are hardly any settings to change, definitely didn't see cache memory as an option. CPU-Z is reporting the same information as when I ran it a few months ago, all the cache stuff is reported okay.

The BOINC GUI reports the last WU taking 17 hours , the estimate for completion of pending jobs has doubled from the usual 3 hrs to over 6.5

According to Task Manager, the current instance of BOINC has been running for 1hr 20 mins, peak mem=16MB, page faults=567,311! :Q That doesn't sound good :thumbsdown: Although the A64 seems to be racking them up also... Maybe that isn't an issue.

There are no other processes using >2% of the CPU at any given time, they're usually null.

I downloaded "boinc_4.60_windows_intelx86.exe" from the site, couldn't find 4.14 or 4.16. Gonna install that now.

Edit: installed, looks a bit different. Ran the benchmarks and got very poor results. Ran it a couple of times and it was fairly random:

double/integer
776/1198
638/672
236/957

 

[Rattledagger]

For downloads
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php?dev=1

If the longer expected crunch-times is before started crunching a wu, this most likely is due to much worse benchmark, and since single-cpu the benchmark should AFAIK not change markedly between runs indicating the cpu is really running slower than before...

In v4.5x, the integer-scores is normally a little lower than before, but these should AFAIK not change expected crunch-times in seti.

As for many page faults, this have always been normal in seti.

Any virus-scanners or something that can be interfering with BOINC?

Of course, there can be some new changes to the wu, so they really takes longer crunch-time... If this is the case, compare if someone else have returned the same wu...

 

[MmmSkyscraper]

Originally posted by: Rattledagger
If the longer expected crunch-times is before started crunching a wu, this most likely is due to much worse benchmark, and since single-cpu the benchmark should AFAIK not change markedly between runs indicating the cpu is really running slower than before...

Yeah my benchmarks are pretty bad compared with the usual results. The weird thing is the machine doesn't feel any slower doing anything else. Okay it's a fairly blank canvas, just XP SP1, AdAware, Firefox and NAV, but if the results were that poor then it should be noticeable in normal use.

Any virus-scanners or something that can be interfering with BOINC?

NAV has never conflicted with BOINC for the last six months or so... I admit there's a first time for everything though.

The only thing running except NAV and BOINC is Windows Update, that's downloading in the background but hardly registers in Task Manager. I had the slow-down issue before Windows Update kicked in, on this XP build and the previous one.

Of course, there can be some new changes to the wu, so they really takes longer crunch-time... If this is the case, compare if someone else have returned the same wu...

But then my A64 should also be taking longer? I guess others in the team would have noticed too, especially when it's as bad as mine. This is really frustrating, had just got myself on a roll and was over 300 average per day (not much to some I know but hey). How would I know if someone else had returned the same WU?

If anybody else has a P4 3GHz and could disable their hyperthreading, is there a CPU benchmark we could both run other than BOINC's?

Thanks for all the help so far.

 

[MmmSkyscraper]

Just uninstalled 4.6 and put 4.16 on. The integer benchmarks are pushing over 2000 now but the double is awful, <500. I'm gonna leave it running over night and see what it gets up to.

 

[Rattledagger]

If you goes http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/hosts_user.php
you'll see a list of your computers. If you clicks on one of these, you'll show your benchmark-score and some other info, but also a link to the "results" you'll currently got assigned to your machine. By clicking on an individual wu, you can get something like this:

http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.ed...kunit.php?wuid=7361082

27699562 485491 5 Jan 2005 13:07:13 UTC 6 Jan 2005 22:29:24 UTC Over Success Done 61,234.87 208.23 33.07
27699563 73285 5 Jan 2005 13:07:15 UTC 5 Jan 2005 20:15:01 UTC Over Success Done 9,331.61 37.49 33.07
27699564 330975 5 Jan 2005 13:07:33 UTC 7 Jan 2005 9:29:03 UTC Over Success Done 13,989.78 24.29 33.07
27699565 302544 5 Jan 2005 13:07:44 UTC 6 Jan 2005 10:46:45 UTC Over Success Done 9,865.34 28.64 33.07


Ouch, 17h and 208.23 claimed while a slower-speed p4-HT is using less than 4 hours...

This clearly shows it's not a problem with an individual wu taking much longer than expected, but something is seriously wrong with your computer.

As for other benchmarks, you can try Sandra from http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/

While other software can interfere with actual crunching, especially crunch-time if win9x, don't know of any reason under XP should give so awful floating-point-benchmark as 500 if there's not something wroing somethere...

 

[MmmSkyscraper]

Originally posted by: Rattledagger
This clearly shows it's not a problem with an individual wu taking much longer than expected, but something is seriously wrong with your computer.

Oh noes!!! And guess when the warranty ran out, ooh about 10 days ago... :roll:

I'll get Sandra on the case and report back. Thanks again for the help, this DC community is the bomb.