Hi,

I've just gotten a new machine that is way more powerful than anything I've had (or used) in my life, mostly for BOINC. I installed BOINC (and very little else), added a number of my existing projects, and let 'er rip. So far, mostly OK, and seeing 23 simultaneous SiDock tasks running was... very nice.

However, I'm getting weird error I never saw before in all my years of running BOINC on my old 4-core machine:

"Suspending computation - CPU is busy"

then:

"Resuming computation"

usually within 20 - 30 seconds, and all tasks start again.

It seems to affect all projects at the same time. And it's happening a lot, randomly, but maybe once every 10 minutes, sometime even 5 minutes.

BOINC settings are mostly (or entirely) out-of-the-box: in use: 100%, 100%, 25%, 50%; NOT in use: 100%, 100%, 50%, 90%.

So far, this doesn't seem to be hurting any computation of the projects, AFAICT, but it sure seems to be wasting a lot of potential CPU time, and is baffling the heck out of me.

Windows 11 pro, 24 cores, 65G RAM, 2 TB SSD, Intel Core Ultra 9 285
current projects running: SiDock, Milkyway, Einstein and Rosetta (though I don't think I've gotten any Rosetta tasks yet).

Anyone half any ideas? Anyone seen this before?

Thanks.

I can't remember if I have ever run sidock. I would go to computing preferences and uncheck any restrictions and see what happens then as a first attempt. As far as I know it doesn't have the massive memory requirements that some CPDN tasks have.

Well... I have other projects running too: probably more Einstein than SiDock, and some Milky Way. And they all stop when this happens. And I've got 4 times as much memory as I had on my old 4-core machine, where I never saw this problem.

When you say "uncheck an restrictions", what exactly should I do?

Thanks for your quick reply.

In reply to Doug's message of 4 Feb 2026:

Well... I have other projects running too: probably more Einstein than SiDock, and some Milky Way. And they all stop when this happens. And I've got 4 times as much memory as I had on my old 4-core machine, where I never saw this problem.

When you say "uncheck an restrictions", what exactly should I do?

Thanks for your quick reply.

It depends whether you are using local preferences or the settings from one of the projects.

If project :-

Within your account go to “Computing Preferences” and find “Suspend when non-BOINC CPU usage is above” and set that to 100%

If local :-

Same setting but it’s in Boinc Manager / Options

In reply to Doug's message of 4 Feb 2026:

BOINC settings are mostly (or entirely) out-of-the-box: in use: 100%, 100%, 25%, 50%; NOT in use: 100%, 100%, 50%, 90%.

You have settings checked to suspend if the PC is in use?
Uncheck all that.

So far, that seems to be working. From once every 5 - 10 minutes, it so far hasn't happened at all in the 7 or so hours since I made the changes you suggested.

I don't understand why that fix had anything to do with the problem, but apparently it did.

Thanks to all!