I have multiple hard drives in my machine and when I run Rosetta it uses my C: for caching and processing which kills my performance. Two questions: (1) Is this normal? (2) Is there a way to tell it to use my other drive for this instead of C:?

Rosetta does not typically perform much disk activity. So while the answer to your question is yes, that you may configure BOINC to store the data on any path you wish, this may not address your performance concerns.

It would seem more likely that your machine's memory is too limited for your normal workload, plus the amount of BOINC work you have configured. A few options there:
Get more memory for the machine :)
Configure BOINC to use less than all of your available CPUs.
Configure BOINC to run at a time of day or only when machine is not in use.
Configure BOINC to use a smaller fraction of available memory. (often has the same net result as using less than all of the CPUs).

The BOINC tasks from any project do run at a low priority on the machine, but CPU priority is not the only potential performance impact. So memory contention is actually more likely than disk contention. And in fact memory contention can cause enough paging activity that the disk gets busy, thus making it more difficult to discern cause and effect.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

Rosetta does not typically perform much disk activity. So while the answer to your question is yes, that you may configure BOINC to store the data on any path you wish, this may not address your performance concerns.

It would seem more likely that your machine's memory is too limited for your normal workload, plus the amount of BOINC work you have configured. A few options there:
Get more memory for the machine :)
Configure BOINC to use less than all of your available CPUs.
Configure BOINC to run at a time of day or only when machine is not in use.
Configure BOINC to use a smaller fraction of available memory. (often has the same net result as using less than all of the CPUs).

The BOINC tasks from any project do run at a low priority on the machine, but CPU priority is not the only potential performance impact. So memory contention is actually more likely than disk contention. And in fact memory contention can cause enough paging activity that the disk gets busy, thus making it more difficult to discern cause and effect.

In one he has 12GB of RAM... which is way more than enough. On the other, he has 4GB, which might not be enough for 8 threads of rosetta.

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One suggestion that comes to mind, if your HDD is a standard spinning drive, upgrade to a Solid State Drive. I found that there's a huge difference in other applications. In fact, I tested out both configurations. I tested how much time it would take to go from a cold start to playing World of Warcraft. On the older system, it would take 6 minutes and 30 seconds. With the Solid State Drive, went down to 1 minute and 45 seconds.

Down side would be the costs involved, but definately something to consider.

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There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those who understand binary, and those who don't.

One suggestion that comes to mind, if your HDD is a standard spinning drive, upgrade to a Solid State Drive. I found that there's a huge difference in other applications. In fact, I tested out both configurations. I tested how much time it would take to go from a cold start to playing World of Warcraft. On the older system, it would take 6 minutes and 30 seconds. With the Solid State Drive, went down to 1 minute and 45 seconds.

Down side would be the costs involved, but definately something to consider.

For one of my computers I already have a Solid State Drive, not installed yet. It's not big enough to hold all the system and data files I have, but should be able to handle the files related to BOINC. What do I need to do in order to make BOINC use it to store its data files, but not also make it the main boot drive or the main place to store data files for other programs?

64-bit Windows Vista SP2
BOINC 7.0.3

For one of my computers I already have a Solid State Drive, not installed yet. It's not big enough to hold all the system and data files I have, but should be able to handle the files related to BOINC. What do I need to do in order to make BOINC use it to store its data files, but not also make it the main boot drive or the main place to store data files for other programs?

64-bit Windows Vista SP2
BOINC 7.0.3

1. Uninstall Boinc. It should leave the data folder and all work in progress intact. Might want to run down your cache just to be sure.
2. Copy the data folder and all of it's contents to you SSD. For Win Vista and 7 the default location is C:ProgramDataBoinc. It's a hidden folder. Check the startup messages in the event log when you start Boinc to be sure, it's listed in the first rows.
3. Reinstall Boinc and be sure to point the installer to the new location of the data folder. If I remember correctly you have to click on a button labeled advanced in the third screen to be able to change the installation location to point to the new location.
4. Start Boinc, it should pick up where it left of.

/Holmis

Not much disk activity? My disks on all my machines thrash more than half the time while using rosetta@home. In the performance monitor, it goes from 20-50MB/s pretty much constantly. I have 12GB of RAM too on one machine.

Not much disk activity? My disks on all my machines thrash more than half the time while using rosetta@home. In the performance monitor, it goes from 20-50MB/s pretty much constantly. I have 12GB of RAM too on one machine.

How much % of RAM is in use? I doubt, that's just from Rosetta, I have an old 250GB IDE drive in my dual core machine and no noteworthy load on it from Rosetta, except for when it starts a new task, but that's just for 2 or 3 seconds.

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It sounds like the machine is short on memory and is writing to the swap file on disk... applications cannot control this, as they are handled by the operating system on the machine.

See some of the initial discussion in this thread about how to configure BOINC to use less memory.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense