BOINC applications not getting detected for throttling?

[dkarl]

Hi!  I just started using TThrottle on a notebook that likes to overheat...  Problem is, it didn't throttle all the BOINC apps it was supposed to...  I started with v1.54, then figured I'd try 1.55, and when that showed the same behaiour, I poked at it further (still 1.55 though, on XP Pro SP3.)

It seems like it might be something in the program detection, because when I ran a test with the stress.exe (added that manually to the throttle list) it worked as expected, so it wasn't like it was completely broken on my Windows setup or anything...  And some apps WERE getting throttle, like CPDN.  I noticed one primegrid app in particular that still ran at full speed.

This machine only has a few projects assigned, so the list is relatively small.  Here's a dump of the "Show all" BOINC list for PrimeGrid:

www.primegrid.com = primegrid_gcwsieve_1.06_windows_intelx86.exe.
www.primegrid.com = primegrid_gcwsieve_wrapper_1.06_windows_intelx86
www.primegrid.com = primegrid_llr_5.07_windows_intelx86.exe.
www.primegrid.com = primegrid_llr_5.09_windows_intelx86.exe.
www.primegrid.com = primegrid_llr_5.10_windows_intelx86.exe.
www.primegrid.com = primegrid_llr_wrapper_5.07_windows_intelx86
www.primegrid.com = primegrid_llr_wrapper_5.09_windows_intelx86
www.primegrid.com = primegrid_llr_wrapper_5.10_windows_intelx86
www.primegrid.com = primegrid_psp_sr2sieve_wrapper_1.11_windows_intelx86
www.primegrid.com = primegrid_screensaver_0.9.3_windows_intelx86
www.primegrid.com = primegrid_sr2sieve_1.11_windows_intelx86.exe.
www.primegrid.com = primegrid_sr2sieve_wrapper_1.11_windows_intelx86


And then here's the process listing for the ones in question:
PID 4232 - primegrid_llr_wrapper_5.09_windows_intelx86.exe - Threads: 3
PID 4852 - primegrid_llr_5.09_windows_intelx86.exe - Threads: 2


And then here's the throttle list:
Number of matching Programs (Processes): 2
Cpu: astropulse_5.03_windows_intelx86.exe, PID: 2912, Threads: 3
Cpu: primegrid_llr_wrapper_5.09_windows_intelx86.exe, PID: 4232, Threads: 3
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


So it picked up the wrapper, but not the "wrapped" primegrid_llr_5.09_windows_intelx86.exe;  if I add that one manually to the throttle list, it works properly - all 3 processes show up in the list, and the notebook doesn't try to boil itself

Looking at detection list, the file shows as primegrid_llr_5.09_windows_intelx86.exe. and I thought that was odd, as the programs that were getting successfully throttled looked like primegrid_llr_wrapper_5.09_windows_intelx86 - no exe, and no trailing dot; I looked in the boinc\projects\www.primegrid.com directory for the actual files, and found something bizarre on primegrid's part.

The app file is named primegrid_llr_5.09_windows_intelx86.exe.orig !  When it actually gets run in one of the slot directories, though, it's been renamed to just plain primegrid_llr_5.09_windows_intelx86.exe ; without knowing exactly how TThrottle does the process matching, I'm going to have to guess that this is the problem.

Do you think there's an easy way to get around this?  It's been a long time since I've had to do process enumeration, so I don't remember if it's possible / easy to match up child processes (in which case, a nice feature would be to throttle process X and all of its children).  Otherwise, since AFAIK BOINC only runs apps from the slots directories, maybe anything in the process list that's running from there could be considered a BOINC process for auto-throttling..?  Just throwing out ideas.  Who would've thought that they'd decide to rename the stupid app before executing it 

In the meantime I'll just add these problem processes manually.
-D

[fred]

Hi D,

In the next version I will rectify this. At the moment only programs that are present at startup of TThrottle are detected. But some projects change a lot so when a new task is loaded it is not throttled at the moment. In the next version I will implement some form of intelligent scanning of the BOINC project directory.

You can see the programs that are found by selecting "Show All" in the "BOINC" tab.

Fred

[dkarl]

That'll be great.  I've been looking forward to a program like TThrottle for a long time; thanks for your work!
-D

[fred]

I changed the detection of the BOINC directory.
In the upcoming version, the directory is scanned every 15 cycles = 15 minutes in the default setting.
If TThrottle goes below 15% it assumes it lost something and the detection cycle goes to < 1 Minute that should hopefully do it.
The new version 1.56 should come out this week.

[Pepo]

This trailing ".exe." problem for PrimeGrid has been hopefully fixed in TThrottle 1.68.