I'm having issues with the amount of ram that Rosetta is using since 1.71 upgrade, work units were hanging with the default settings in BOINC so I have upped the Disk and Ram settings, which seems to have fixed they unit's hanging.

Today however I saw some unit's saying waiting for ram, check the free ram in perfmon, there is still ~1.5Gb of free ram, I have BOINC set to use 90% of ram and 90% of page file, as the machine does nothing but run BOINC.

The spec's of the computer are:
Dual Xeon E5472 @ 3Ghz
4Gb Ram
40Gb HDD
8800GTS & 8800GT
Supermicro X7DWA-N
Windows Server 2008 SP2

Any sugestions, BOINC isn't using the RAM I tell it to use, I pose the simple solution is to buy more ram, it just seems dumb that it won't max the ram out!

I'm sure someone more qualified than me will come along to help shortly

In the meantime ....

I'm not familiar with perfmon, but I just fired it up to take a look. I couldn't find anywhere where it actually reports memory information. Are you sure the 1.5GB of free ram you see is physical memory or could it be pagefile/swapfile memory. Have you asked the project if their application will use pagefile/swapfile? Could you post your memory numbers from task manager or post a screen capture like this ...




[EDIT] Oh, and don't buy more ram until you've explored this situation more or gotten more answers here ... it likely won't help anyway and would probably be a waste of money. [/EDIT]

Unless Windows Server 2008 is a 64-bit system, you can't address more than 4 GB.

With regard to your problem, does a restart of the BOINC client help (Shutdown connected client...)?
What about allowing 99% of memory usage?
What about the preference "Leave applications in memory while suspended?" Sometimes BOINC traps itself by using up memory when loading task after task in search for one that fits into memory.

I'm just brainstorming, as I have no experiences with that problem

Gruß,
Gundolf

maybe it's a problem specific to those rosetta jobs. i am running a similar host and ran into trouble like that with ECM-YOYOs which tend to take up to 2 GB/task for a short time.

4GB for a V8 is pretty tight on some projects...

Perfmon, has the same info as task manger, but you can view the data from another computer which is useful as the computer in question doesn't have any screen and Remote Desktop kills GPUGrid.

Here's the screenshot of TaskMan



I've upped the ram to 95% so it's eeked upto 70%. I've not tried the leave in ram settings, I can give them a go.

The system is x64 so I can run upto 64Gb of ram, if I could afford it.

Cheers Frank, I'll leave perfmon running and see if there is some spikes up.

I checked on eBay I might be able to take it up to 8Gb for £20 so not too bad after all.

Here's the ram usage graph for the last 10hrs, seems OK

No program will ever use all of your computer's RAM, no matter how many apps you are running or how intense they are, they will not use all the RAM. Also, maybe rosetta does not need all the RAM to run. Think of it this way, the program is using, lets say 500MB worth of files. It stores those files in RAM so it can access them quickly while it computes. So just because you have 4GB does not mean it will use it all.

Obviously, you've always had an insane ammount of RAM... Currently, Activity Monitor (OS X 10.5.7) reports that I only have 10 MB of 2 GB free. Of course, I've got Firefox with multiple tabs, BOINC and VMWare Fusion with Windows XP (512 MB dedicated to that) running.

Programs may not use all of the RAM but can use enough of it to drag the computer down so far it's totally unusable. Try running 4 of the longer running YoYo ecm_mp Wu's with 4gb of RAM. They can take up to 1.5gb -1.7gb of RAM each at their Peak and make the Computer almost stop if not stop. So you have to be careful what you run sometimes ...

Hehe, true. With yoyo ecm's I even got the dreaded "waiting for memory" message.
So ALL my RAM was used and still one WU was stopped at least because I didn't have enough free RAM.