Thanks for the clarification. I apologize for misunderstanding it; however, I am curious what the above-mentioned FAQ means by "This throttle feature is not yet available for the Boinc based agents"? As you pointed out, the throttle agent appears to be built-in to it.

On a semi-related topic.... you may know that Mac OS X users can change the scheduling priority of the programs running on their computer by opening up the "terminal" application (which brings up a Unix prompt) and entering the "renice" command. For example, if the science application is running with process ID #6001, I could bump its priority up by entering something like

sudo renice -10 -p 6001

Would this have a similar effect to changing the preferences in the BOINC manager to allow a higher %CPU utilization, or does it do something totally different? And if it does something different, is there a possibility that it may affect the science results? (I know a little bit about the OS, but they say a little bit knowledge can be a dangerous thing.)

You wrote:

Is the effect on other applications the worst thing that can happen, or can re-nicing the Science Application also affect accuracy? I expect to be running something in the background that by default consumes an incredible amount of processing power, and I want BOINC to pre-empt it.

Okay I entered this command

sudo renice 0 -p 558

from the Terminal window, where 558 is the process number of the program wcg_dddt_autodock_5.10_i686-apple-darwin. As I understand, this should change the priority of the science application from lowest to normal. I confirmed by executing the command

ps -A -l -c

(or ps -A -l -w)

that the value of "PRI" (which as I understand it, is higher for high priority processes) for process 558 went from 12 to 31, and that the value of "NI" (which I understand is higher for low priority processes) for that same process (wcg_dddt_autodock_5.10_i686-apple-darwin) went from 19 to 0.

Then I started up an MMORPG and executed the command

renice 20 -p 786

which should bump process 786, the game, to the lowest priority. (I am less concerned about the performance of the game than I am about the performance of the science.)

Well, for a long time there was no noticeable difference in the performance of the game, and then the game eventually crashed, which it does anyway I think because it's buggy, and a while after I restarted the game (without having to restart BOINC), I lost network connectivity (not a big deal, it's just a game). And also, the computer started to make a funny noise, but this has been happening intermittently for a while since about a month (maybe less) after I started running the WCG, so I think that is just a result of the the computer being on most of the time, or it may be just a coincidence. In any case, I am really not sure whether the performance of BOINC improved; it is entirely possible that it did somewhat.

This raises a different question: can a buggy game or other software running on the computer corrupt the memory used by BOINC or its science application? I know that Mac OS X supports protected memory, but I wonder if it always works, as past experience shows that on very rare occasion an application crash can freeze the machine--usually it doesn't though. Anyway if the results fail to validate then I'll post a follow-up right away, or if you want to verify the accuracy manually, the name of the work unit is: dddt0401k0637_ZINC06175606-0000_00_1. If those who know more than I think that another buggy application can corrupt the science application, then I'll just stop using the MMORPG and BOINC at the same time.