I'm not sure the description is accurate of "The number of processors used will be the lesser of the two fields below.".
Suggest try reducing % of CPUs.

Paul.

sepmsk

I am not sure what you are trying to get. How many threads do you have? Are you trying to use 4, or 50% of 4 which is 2?

Mike

I used % of CPUs to use to make this work some time ago (no more)

I just did it now on a 4 core machine. Told it 74% and at once 2 running tasks stopped Windows 10 client 7.14.3

I then tried an 8 core machine Ubuntu 20.04.1 client 7.16.6 at 49% and 5 tasks stopped; changed it to 50% and 1 task started again.

Both are set at 100% of CPU time

I'm doing this using the BOINC manager running on another machine and connect to the target remotely via my LAN.

Neither of these 2 machines are headless but I did try a headless Ubuntu once (just to see) and I could still connect to it using the Boinc manager (GUI).

Hi all, many thanks for the help! This machine has 6 cores and I'm trying to have boinc use 4 cores only. I would prefer not to change "On multiprocessors, use: 100 % of processors" parameter since a have another 4 core machine attached to this profile and I'm just fine with boinc using 4 cores (100% of CPUs) there.

I configured

<global_preferences>
<max_cpus>4</max_cpus>
</global_preferences>

in /etc/boinc-client/global_prefs_override.xml file on this 6 core machine and issued

$ sudo -u boinc boinccmd --read_global_prefs_override

command. However, I still see 6 wcgrid tasks running instead of 4. What am I missing?

I gave the answer above. My solutions has nothing to do with profiles in WCG. It's on the machine itself using whatever profile you like (default, work, home, or school).

I just use profiles for which projects this profile will allow and how many of each (Project Limits and Available Projects). The rest of the parameters are default. (Processor Usage, Graphics Card Usage, Graphics, Disk Usage, Memory Usage, Network Usage, and Workunit Cache Settings.

edit this file: /etc/boinc-client/global_prefs_override.xml

change this line:
<max_ncpus_pct>100.000000</max_ncpus_pct>
to
<max_ncpus_pct>67.000000</max_ncpus_pct>

then boinccmd --read_global_prefs_override

If 67.000000 gives you more than 4 tasks then use 66.000000

Edit: and to make sure this is correct I just did this from a terminal line as if the machine were in headless mode.. Set to 50.000000 read the override file and 4 of 8 tasks stopped then reset to 100% and all 8 run again.