Hi, I found an old mac pro, an early one 2,1. Upgraded it to the latest supported OS, which is Lion.

I installed Boinc on it fine and attached to einstein@home. It works, its downloaded WU's and all 8 cores (2 * 3Ghz Quad Core Xeon) are running tasks in the Boinc management screen.

the only issue is the machine appears to be idle, and each core is reporting 1-2% useage, with nothing else running. process monitor and top both indicate the CPU is mostly idle.

I wondered if it was thermal throttling, and downloaded Mac Fan , which reports that the CPU's are around 50-low 60 degrees c, which seems OK

I tried reducing the number of CPU's it could use, thinking some other resource might be low. The machine only has 4Gb of memory, but as far as I can see there is memory free.

Any suggestions as to what I'm clearly missing ?

I *could* install linux on the hardware, though I'm not sure if Boinc running on Linux on mac would find any jobs to run, as I guess it might declare itself as something exotic when attaching for jobs ?

many thanks

Jonathan

OK, did a bit more digging and it appears to be memory constraint.

When I dropped down to 1 core , I can get that one up to 100%

Good to see you figured it out.

Memory overload or lack of memory will always be a constraint to run or cause task to crash.

In your initial post you didn't mention how much RAM it has installed and how much is available. That's always important troubleshooting information.

Just wondering if there was anything in the BOINC log to indicate a problem. Ideally BOINC should refuse to start more tasks than you have the resources to run. I know that it won't let me run tasks with insufficient disk space.

In reply to Dave's message of 10 Sep 2024:

Just wondering if there was anything in the BOINC log to indicate a problem. Ideally BOINC should refuse to start more tasks than you have the resources to run. I know that it won't let me run tasks with insufficient disk space.

Remembering now from CPDN that BOINC won't let you download tasks if it doesn't have enough RAM for individual tasks but does let you start a second or subsequent task even if there is only enough RAM for one of them. In an ideal world swap should prevent this being a problem though many with 64GB+ of RAM are operating without this these days. Personally, I like to still have the option to suspend to disk.