I have noticed that when I run World Community Grid at 95% across all 4 cores on my computer that the 5% delay (i.e., 100%-95%) occurs on all cores at the same time as seen on various CPU monitors like Resource Monitor.

My wish is that these delays have a randomization factor added so that all cores do not pause together.

Environment:
Win 7, Intel I7 with Hyperthreading, 8 GB. Use of Ramdisk for Boinc work areas.

Oh, BTW I am using BOINC 6.12.34 (x64) for World Community Grid.

To spread out the pause such that there are more times when cores are not used (i.e. 5%) rather than have all cores become unused by the science applications at the same time.

Since I am using a RAMDisk, therefore little I/O delay to help interrupt processing, and am running the utilization of WCG at 95% I can see delays in new program starts and general usability.

I realize that the science applications run at low priority in W7 but I assume that the operating system does not take control away from the science applications immediately, but after some processor time slice.

Bottom line: It would enhance the usability of my Intel I7 machine if the pausing of the science applications occurred randomly and not all at the same time.

So, a quick question please. You may have noted that I am using a RAMDisk for WCG thereby eliminating disk I/O interrupts which I believe keeps the science projects humming along in their time slices. Have you tried a RAMdisk for the BOINC work areas?

While the science projects do run at low priority I doubt whether Win 7 has realtime operating system characteristics thereby even the lowest priority work is not immediately interrupted for higher priority work.

Lastly, I was running WCG at 100% just as you are and, for example, the Microsoft Flight Simulator takes twice as long to start when compared to the times when I suspend all science projects which confirms to me that even tasks running at the lowest priority do have an effect on other workloads.

Memory = 8 GB
Swap file moved to a different physical hard drive and not on c:
RAMDisk at 512 MB
After Flight Sym starts there seems to be plenty of memory based upon what I see in the resource manger.
The pointer was to Ubuntu which is interesting because I run a VirtualBox Fedora 15 guest at 1536 MB although it rarely uses that much memory. I would rather have Win 7 as the primary operating system and Linux as a guest since Linux runs rather well virtualized.

As you can see I use my Win 7 machine for quite a few disperse activities and I happy it is relatively stable.

Thanks for the dialogue.