I wonder why "preempted" work doesn't get unloaded from BOINC, to save memory? As i can see preempted work is simply "hibernating" and everything is still loaded in memory. Thats kinda wasting of resources if i'm not actively doing anything for that work.
I hope this can be still solved so memory usage is more dinamic resulting in less unnecessary load on my system.
Or is there some deeper connection between several projects in 1 BOINC client?

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You can set your preferences to remove it from memory....

You may want to rethink the idea of removing from memory, as some project may lose processing time, and others may run faster if left in memory, while some may get errors if removed from memory....

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BOINC Wiki

And where can i set that? I checked entire BOINC and i can't find any preferences/options. Especially not this feature that i'm looking for.

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And where can i set that? I checked entire BOINC and i can't find any preferences/options. Especially not this feature that i'm looking for.

You can go to your account page, click on "View or edit general preferences". On the General preferences page, click on "Edit preferences", at the bottom of the page. Under the processor usage section, you will see a line for "leave applications in memory while preempted". When you have made your changes, go to the bottom of the page and be sure to Update preferences. Then, if you'd like the change(s) to be applied immediately, you can click on the running project on the Projects tab in Boinc Manager and clicl "Update".

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"The arc of history is long, but it bends toward Justice"

Thanks for help! Memory usage is now much lower and i can do the same work :)

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Thanks for help! Memory usage is now much lower and i can do the same work :)

Again, while you may FEEL that memory usage is "much lower", because of the way virtual memory works, it probably isn't. Maybe one MB per application that is now "unloaded", probably much less, a few KB. And there is a very real risk that you will have errors on some projects (for example, Rosetta will now fail probably 25-50% of the time) and will have lost crunching time on others (for example, you will lose an average of 3 minutes of crunching every time SETI is switched out, if your CPU and the other preference settings matches mine). If your computer is slow, some projects can lose the entire _hour_ of crunching when switched out, and you'll "sit" at the same percentage complete, forever.

I for one wish that there was a line on that preference that says "Leave this set to 'YES' unless your system is crashing, and even then, ask first". If it works for you, great, but if you start having problems, putting it back to 'YES' would be the first thing I'd try.

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I agree with Bill about this. What people may not understand, but relates to this, is that if you do not want to leave applications in memory you really must opt to spend a fairly long time on each application. Preferably much more than an hour, and certainly longer than the few minutes that some prefer.

The reason for that is that applications have fixed save points or none at all. Sometimes you can defer them, so that you save less often, but you cannot tell the application to save to disk at the point you have got to when you switch. Only leaving the application in memory can let you carry on from there, so removing from memory will almost always mean some loss of work. The only way to reduce that is to swap less often.

People who do have a problem leaving several applications in memory might like to consider doing no more than two projects at a time. The BOINC Manager offers easy ways of of controlling this - especially setting a project to get no more work, to run down the cache, and using the suspend button to determine which projects will be active. So you can still be participating in several projects, but not every day, and it may well be that leaving the application in memory will not then be a problem.

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Well why on earth is this feature available at all, if it's so risky?!
All apps use pagefile, i wonder why should i keep something in memory if it's not doing anything. Athlon XP 3200+ with 512MB 400MHz DDR DC RAM using 200GB 8MB cache Maxtor HDD shouldn't pose any problems. System is in excellent condition all the time so errors and data loss shouldn't be a problem at all. I don't care how much virtual memory is used. I have over 1GB of dedicated pagefile partition that is fragmentation proof. Only problem is the physical memory that i don't have that much (512MB is nothing in these days), but i can easily give away gigabyte or so of disk space to page that thing. Also if i lose few minutes of work hat isn't a big deal. PC is running 24/7...

Btw i'm running 3 projects, BOINC is switching projects on it's own. I just run the app, thats all. I leave all decisions to program itself. Now each project was eating around 70-80MB of physical memory on average. Multiply with 3 and you get the picture on 512MB RAM system...

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