I have been slowly upgrading my various work and home Macs to Leopard 10.5. At each upgrade I remove BOINC due to the change Apple made to the scheduler in Leopard: -nice is now ignored. This makes CPUs run hot, with the fans on, and takes significant time from foreground apps. Prior to this current credit meltdown the world was more peaceful, with BOINC and FAH apps using truly spare cycles in the background, keeping cool and unobtrusive.

I filed a bug with Apple, but they said this change was intended.

Can the BOINC and FAH researchers put pressure on Apple to revert this change? I think there are others who have removed these formerly green apps from their Macs. Thanks!

Forwarded to the BOINC developers. I can't help you contact the Folding@Home developers as they're a totally different kettle of fish.

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I forgot I had gotten an answer from the BOINC developers. They say that it is a defect in Apple's Activity Monitor which fails to report the "nice" values, that Apple will fix this in the future. Also see this thread on that.

In the mean time you could try using the throttle function in BOINC, although that one can give trouble with tasks constantly restarting on systems with multiple CPUs/cores/HT. This is a bug in the throttling system though which will be fixed in a future version of BOINC (all bets are on for which version that's going to be. I'm betting 8.2 ;-))

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