Does anyone use the the exclusive app feature in BOINC?
I’m thinking of moving over to it as it would make gaming far easier to just add the game launch to my cc_config.xml file and then I don’t have to worry about closing down BOINC before gaming (now I currently run a batch script to shutdown the folding service)
For those that don’t know, I found this earlier on my web searches
You can have a cc_config.xml in your BOINC Data directory that will suspend your BOINC (under Windows only, I’m afraid) automatically when any of the exclusive applications you told it to look out for is detected in main memory. (*)
To do so, set up the cc_config.xml file with the following options (example of my cc_config.xml):
<cc_config> <options> <exclusive_app>Spybot.exe</exclusive_app> <exclusive_app>Crysis.exe</exclusive_app> <exclusive_app>Winamp.exe</exclusive_app> <exclusive_app>Mplayer.exe</exclusive_app> </options> </cc_config>You only need to tell what application name it needs to look out for, no need for the full path to the name. If you already have one, you can add the <options></options> part to your existing cc_config.xml file.
Watch out with launcher files. For example, Fallout 3 uses the Fallout 3 Launcher, which does not stay in memory after you launched the game. So do not use the launcher file as the exclusive app, but the game executable’s name instead. I have tested this with the Oblivion launcher as well, here it is the other way around. If you add the Oblivion executable only, BOINC will not suspend. You will have to use the Oblivion Launcher name.
(*) There is a problem when you have your preferences set to Leave applications in memory while suspended. Any task still in the video card’s RAM will stay there until you resume BOINC. Although it will not use your GPU, the amount of memory that a Seti CUDA tasks takes up (200MB+ of the VRAM) may still have impact on your other activities.
BOINC 6.6 will unload the task from video memory when you suspend BOINC and the task has at least checkpointed once.