Linux/OSX SMP core update increases throughput > 35%

[Ragnar Dan]

That's very peculiar. I've haven't heard of a *nix -style OS having problems with process priority since back when Linux was just starting out, or maybe that was Minix I'm thinking of, or some other now-probably-disappeared OS.

[Flying Fox]

Unfortunatly OS X 10.5.6 CPU scheduler is still broken. Apple is still denying there is a problem to begin with so i can't fold on my MBP.

Whenver i fold, my computer slows down to a crawl (when playing flash videos for example) as the scheduler is not treating "Niced" programs as Nice priority but rather as User priority so it's competing with all my other programs for resources.

Here's hope 10.6 will fix this although from what i've seen in the leaked seeds, it doesn't look like it.

Someone at FAH needs to release a SINGLE CORE client for OS X. This is getting beyond ridiculous.

Adi

Run the single core Windows client in a VM?

[Ragnar Dan]

It appears that the client will run on a single core if you don't add the -smp flag. It's basically similar to the Linux client in operation.

Edit: The best temporary solution, though, is probably the same as one I found for my GPU client to run on XP Pro, which is a utility to modify priority. For someone only running the SMP client, he can probably just change it manually and leave it be until it downloads the next WU and he wants to use it for something else again. Or a script could be written to lower the priority every, say, 10 minutes, and that way he'd never find it troublesome when he began using it unless it happened that he got there right at the start of a new WU which hadn't had its priority lowered yet, in which case he could just run the script itself that is called by crontab and that would be that.