The problem with the current policy is that it can be up to 9 seconds after somebody starts a movie before BOINC will suspend.
That'll be 9 seconds of glitches for both audio and video in the worst case scenario. For the media center experience, it is easier to reboot the computer than to go get the keyboard and mouse to see what is going on. I don't run BOINC on the media center since it already has enough going on, however I do rebooted the media center when it glitches for more than 2 or 3 seconds. ----- Rom -----Original Message----- From: David Anderson [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2010 1:05 PM To: Rom Walton Cc: Charlie Fenton; BOINC Developers Mailing List Subject: Re: API suggestion to help in user retention Rom Walton wrote: > > It seems to me that it would be better to monitor this once a second and > then use a decaying average to prevent needlessly starting and stopping > processes for apps that jump around the user defined threshold. I'm not sure what you mean by "needless". If the load average is close to threshold, BOINC should stop until it's well below threshold. The current policy is: every 10 seconds, look at CPU usage over the last 10 sec. If it's greater than 25%, suspend BOINC; otherwise, resume BOINC. Suppose there's some activity that uses 100% of the CPU for 1 second, every 5 seconds. The current mechanism won't trigger. a) We could make it trigger by sampling every 1 sec. Then, on average, BOINC would suspend itself halfway through every spike. b) Or we could be more aggressive: sample every 1 sec, and if CPU load is above 25%, suspend BOINC for the next 10 sec. This would keep BOINC suspended indefinitely while that activity is going on. We need to do some experimentation with real apps (e.g. video playback, commercial-removing software) to decide whether to use a) or b), and what the parameters should be. Maybe what we should do is provide detailed controls via cc_config.xml, and let people experiment. -- David _______________________________________________ boinc_dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ssl.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/boinc_dev To unsubscribe, visit the above URL and (near bottom of page) enter your email address.
