LHC@home

Hi

All the LHC apps have high memory usage, and don't seem to release after it has finished a job. Steadily climbs till its almost at the limit of PCs memory of 16Gbs. The preferences are set to 50% in use and 80% not in use, but climps to about 14.9 all the time, making the PC slow.

What am I missing ?

Kim

Your preferences are set to run ATLAS using a 6-core setup which configures a VM that allocates 8400MB RAM.
See some lines from your logfile:

2021-11-29 01:22:19 (16620): Setting Memory Size for VM. (8400MB)
2021-11-29 01:22:20 (16620): Setting CPU Count for VM. (6)

BOINC requires this plus some RAM for it's own client and the vboxwrapper.


You stated:

The preferences are set to 50% in use ...

This would be 8 GB on your 16 GB computer, hence less than the RAM allocated by the VM.
As a result BOINC suspends the VM whenever the computer switches to "in use".
Suspending/resuming vbox tasks with large VMs causes lots of work, especially for the I/O subsystem.
It also requires lots of RAM until a snapshot is written.

Short term workaround(s):
1. Allow BOINC to use more RAM while the computer is "in use".
2. Use a setup with less cores, e.g. 4, and keep the "not in use" RAM limit low enough to avoid 2 of those VMs are running concurrently.

Mid-/long term solution:
Buy more RAM

Appreciate your reply !

One more question, I haven't found a way to reduce the number of CPU cores. In VM its greyed-out and says 6 cores.

In the prefs of LHC@Home you can set the CPU's from all to a number you want.
When a task is running it shown in grey, because no possibilty to change it at this moment.

memory and cpu consumption is too high for me.

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memory and cpu consumption is too high for me.

What application do you mean?
From the VBox-apps Theory application is less demanding. You can select the application in your project preferences.

I am running Boinc Manager directly on Windows 10 system. VM-box etc. I do not use.