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RE: The Gridcoin 4x4x4 Challenge
The i7 should work well as a BOINC cruncher even though it is a few generations old. The amount of RAM might be a bigger issue for running multiple all threads at once when you compute some of the more memory hungry projects.
I try to be part of a few BOINC projects at once to buffer against work shortages and also to have a spread of GPU and CPU projects.
VirtualBox with BOINC needs a bit more user intervention and micro-management so it is best to leave those projects until you have been on step 5 for a while and want to spice things up a bit.
I hope you enjoy the ride.
Thanks for the detailed reply.
RAM does indeed seem to be needed (task manager doesn't really help here, showing very small values, but I estimate up to 2GB of RAM eaten by the 4 BOINC tasks in various project combinations). Fortunately I have 10GB so I'm good even with a lot of other stuff running on the system.
Can you please give me any links where I could start reading up on VBox projects optimizations? Perhaps there's a second 4x4x4 challenge in there somewhere :)
10GB should be plenty for a combination of most projects but VirtualBox does complicate task management because each virtual machine allocates memory using a kernel-mode driver. Memory used by the virtual machines will not be displayed in the task list and BOINC Manager will not be able to enforce memory limits.
The total amount of RAM used by the system can be seen in the Performance tab of Task Manager program. The value for "committed" memory includes processes in RAM and the system page-file (the page-file is often referred to Virtual Memory but is not actually part of the virtual machines), if your committed memory is much more than 10GB then it is likely your computer will have a performance reduction as data is frequently moved from RAM to and from the disk (known as paging).
In my personal experience, the best way to manage over use of RAM by virtual machine projects is to manually set a limit on the number of instances that BOINC can run simultaneously for each project. Each project can be configured using the app_config.xml file located in the project's sub folder of the Boinc Data Directory.
eg; the default folder location for SETI would be C:\ProgramData\BOINC\projects\setiathome.berkeley.edu.
Information about use of the app_config.xml is available in the BOINC Wiki pages
You can restrict individual applications but I like to keep it simple and restrict the whole project with a file like this:
NOTE: If the app_config.xml file already exists in the project directory just insert the <project_max_concurrent> tags somewhere between <app_config> and </app_config>.
After changing the app_config.xml file you will have to force BOINC Manager to read the file.
There is a menu item for this in the Advanced View: Options->read config files.
If you use your laptop for work or play as well as BOINC you will need to experiment with the number of virtual machines you can run without impacting the system performance. Even if you are within 10GB of committed memory the virtual machines will not always be the lowest priority process so you can expect some latency in high performance programs.
On my desktop i7-3770 I run BOINC processes in the background on 5 cores (62.5% cores) and allow up to 3 virtual machines without a noticeable reduction in performance. Results will vary for individual circumstances.
Don't forget to check the message boards of your projects, there will probably be some good advice specific to their applications.