How do I get my Windows grid agent to use 100% of the available CPU?
When running the grid agent for Windows you will now see that 100% of the CPU is not used by default. We have introduced a default setting of 60%. If the agent sees the overall system CPU usage go above this value, it backs off (with some exceptions) to try to not add to the CPU usage. Thus, if some other applications are using more than the specified percentage of CPU utilization, the grid work will almost completely stop. The agent runs at the absolutely lowest CPU priority, so it instantaneously gives up the CPU to anything else needing it in the machine, except for any other process also running at the lowest priority, with which it would split the remaining CPU time. There are usually very few if any other processes running at the lowest priority.
However, we have found that some recently designed machines deal with the slight increase in CPU temperature from running at higher utilization percentages, by slowing the system clock rather than speeding up the cooling fan as needed. This could cause everything to run slower on such a machine. To keep this from happening, we decided to reduce the grid agent's default CPU throttle setting to around 60% so that the CPU does not heat up much. If you wish to change the CPU utilization setting, we provide a downloadable tool to do this. This throttle feature is not yet available for the Boinc based agents. We felt that our grid has grown sufficiently that we can afford to do this and be even less obtrusive to our member's machines. But, if your machine is able to run at 100% CPU utilization, we certainly welcome the additional contribution that brings to our projects.
The tool can be downloaded from
here. For those who want to check the md5sum to be certain it was downloaded correctly, the
md5sum value is be682ba3260490f20fe5eb5672ff6909. After downloading the tool, run it, set the slider to the desired percentage and click OK. If you used our prior method of setting the throttle, that value will be used until the tool is used to set a new value. Additional detailed help, exceptions and technical information is available using the tool's Help button. We hope it is fairly obvious how to use the tool. Feel free to let us know about any problems or suggestions. Thank you.
