I watch the Activity Monitor (CPU Activity) on my Mac - G4 Dual 533. Up until today, both processors would be occupied by mostly "% Nice" and BOINC would run two projects at the same time, both using 60-80% of their CPU. Today for some reason, one CPU is occupied almost entirely by "% System" while the other CPU is 50% occupied by "% Nice", and BOINC projects are only using 15-30% of my CPUs. I've tried restarting BOINC, and restarting my computer, and no change. Any ideas out there?

Thank you.

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Spotlight indexing? iDisk syncing? Either of those would continue after a reboot. Activity Monitor _should_ give _some_ indication of what's taking the resources, even if it's a system process. You may have to select "all processes" from the drop-down.

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Bill

One of those "why didn't I think of that?" moments. Thank you.

A "kernel_task" is using 100+% and the two SETI clinents are still at 15-25%.

Thanks again.

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The "kernel_task" has been running for 24 hours. Anyone have any ideas?

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I'm lost... all I can do is throw some suggestions. If you have more than one user set up, log in as the other user, see if it's running there. Use software update and make sure you're up-to-date. Dismount the iDisk. Shut down, turn off any external drives and reboot. Unplug network cable. Remove everything from your list of startup items and reboot, then put them back one at a time. Run a virus scan. Make sure there's not a corrupted CD/DVD in the drive, or some USB/Firewire storage device attached that has a problem (digital camera, iPod, etc.).

As you can tell, I'm just guessing on all of it! :-(

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Bill

I recently restarted and kernel_task went back to its normal 3-5% and hy BOINC projects are back up to 60-70%. I got a reply from the Apple Forum and someone has a the same problem on a PowerBook occasionally, and he restarts and then rebuilds permissions.

Thanks, again.

Michael

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this it may be a PowerBook thing... it happens regularly on my Rev.A 12" PB (yes, I know I need a new one!) where the kernel_task goes wild, but on the G5 edit machine it never happens. I don't try and figure it out, just restart every Monday morning whatever!

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Random Thoughts

this it may be a PowerBook thing... it happens regularly on my Rev.A 12" PB (yes, I know I need a new one!) where the kernel_task goes wild, but on the G5 edit machine it never happens. I don't try and figure it out, just restart every Monday morning whatever!

Actually I have seen the same thing on a G4 dual running Mac OS 10.4.4. In my case the Kernel process was being run by root. I have found that using application monitor I can just abort the process and the system will settle down.

I have only seen this behavior when a R@H WU was running. I do not know if there is a relationship there or not.

Regards
Phil

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I have the same problem, but mine is a little different. I have a single processor G5 and most of the time that SETI runs, it will not let go of the processor when it's time for other processes to run (i.e. Einstein fires up, but SETI continues to run). I wouldn't care, except that while SETI is taking up ~40% of the processor, it's not getting any work done--it's just eating processor cycles. This leaves the other project which is supposed to be running only about 40% of the processor for it to do actual work.

I checked STERR for BOINC and for SETI, but I didn't see anything jump out at me that was a problem. It's been happening for at least the last week or so for sure, so I thought it might be a server communications issue causing it to hang. It's always SETI that causes the problem; none of the other projects do this.

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I have a hypothesis for what caused my problem and I was wondering if any of the rest of you who had a similar problem can corroborate or deny. The times when SETI seized up seems to correlate with dates when SETI was having connection problems (like over the MLK weekend (13-16 Jan 06) outage and subsequent work to restore it.

My STERRGUI.txt log has a long line of repeats of this message, but it doesn't say SETI specifically, nor do I see a date stamp that goes with it:

init_poll: get_socket_error(): 61

STERR for the SETI slot is blank now, so I don't know what was in there before--if SETI did report an error to this file it was wiped out by the last restart of BOINC manager.

Ok, no connection problems with the SETI project today, yet it happened again...twice. I also failed to mention earlier that it used to show up as "Kernel Task" like one of the earlier posters, but lately the thread has reported as SETI, but again, 40% of the available processor for no sign of work getting done, while another project (Einstein, Rosetta, or Predictor) struggles with the remaining 40%. Could BOINC be mistaking my machine for a dual processor machine and scheduling SETI and another project to both run on the same processor simultaneously?