No seriously, it is. Processor usage jumps up and down about 40%-60% on about a 2 second cycle. There is nothing else running on this machine. My main concern is that the fans are responsive to load, so the fans keep spinning up and down on the same cycle. I'm worried this will prematurely wear out the fans and it's annoying to listen to.

In this screen shot I have max processor usage at 40%, this keeps the load low enough that the fans don't spin up often. But I'd prefer to run at like 90%.


I'm not sure if these jobs read the HD a lot, but the HD is a Raid1 with 2x 7200 dives. I can't imagine this is caused by reads.

Anything I can do to settle the pluses down?

Not seen this before but I run mine without any restriction on CPU usage. If you want to keep temps down a bit lower, my own and others' experience is that it is better done by restricting the number of cores in use. (On my laptop, in winter I let it run with all four going but now it is getting hotter I keep it down to two most of the time.)

What Dave said. To restrict the temperature, restrict the number of cores used by BOINC. Otherwise you'll have something similar to what you've shown. I'd go 100% CPU time and try 50% of the cores, and cut it down to 40% of the cores if necessary. Using hyperthreading with that many cores will likely not be efficient in terms of total model throughput anyway.

Thanks for the info, I'll play with it and see what happens.

I think that was it. I changed to 70% CPUs and 100% time and it's very steady at 80% overall usage.

Thanks again.