Bitcoin Forum

Couple of questions for the non-newbies of Bitcoin Mining:

1. When running GUIMiner, is it possible to specify a maximum usage amount per miner? Meaning that, when running Ufasoft CPU Miner, it uses all of the remaining CPU's processing power. Is it possible to limit that amount, to, for example, 75%, so that the mining never takes up more that 75% of the usage. And the same for the GPU.

2. If I upgrade my operating system from XP to Win7, what will happen to my Bitcoin Wallet?

Thanks

I'm not sure that there is an easy way to limit the usage... I think most people are going for 100% usage maximum efficiency.

If you are upgrading you operating system I would suggest that you backup your wallet.dat to some sort of external medium.
That way if you do format the drive during installation, or loose your bitcoin install some other way you would still have a backup.

Defiinitelu

CPU mining is obsolete.  But if you have a multi-core system, you can dedicate your CPU miner to have an "affinity" specific cores.  In my case, I have 4 cores, so I could allow any program to stick to cores 0,1, and 2, and leave 3 alone. etc.

How? (I do it in Windows 7)  Bring up your task manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) and click on the processes tab. Then find your software name on the list. (must be running)

Then right-click it and select "Affinity" and then check only the cores you wish this software to use.  You're done.  Close Task Manager.

I would guess you want to have a smooth desktop experience while the miner works in the background.

For GPU mining, the easiest way to "limit" the usage is to set the Aggression parameter. For example in the Phoenix miner set aggression to 6 or lower to have the miner behave more like a background task. Most miners have an Aggression or equivalent parameter.

For CPU mining... Just don't do it - the power the CPU uses up while mining will cost you more than the worth of the BTC mined that way.

I do have a quad core CPU, however when selecting CPU affinity in GUIMiner to less than all four cores, it continues to use all of them at 100%.
Tried 0-3 cores affinity and they all produce the same result, 100% CPU usage.

There's no option in GUIMiner to select "Aggression parameters". Do you need specific flags? (My current GPU works best with an OpenCL Miner).

un GUIminer there is also the -s flag, not sure if it works for CPUs aswell but if you use a GPU you can do -s x.xx where X is the amount of time the GPU should idle before the next cycle, for example with my old 4850 i used -s 0.11 otherwise the fan would go crazy

Do you have the latest GUIminer version 2011-06-14? There should be "CPU Affinity" check boxes. Use those in conjunction with the Task-Manager trick, making sure to set it on "guiminer.exe" as well as "polcbm.exe." There is a new "polcbm.exe" in the processes list for every active worker you have "started" on guiminer.  LMK if that was the problem.

Setting the affinity in Windows Task Manager does limit the CPU Usage to specific cores, however it uses up all of the activated cores.

Is there a way to use a certain amount of a core?

Also, doing the same with poclbm.exe, does not limit the GPU usage.

Using the latest version of GUIMiner under 32-bit XP.

So, you have 4 cores, and want only 75% of your CPU to work, but having 3 cores at 100% is not what you mean. I guess the real question is WHY. Why doesn't this method work for you? The math is sound. (100+100+100+0) / 4 = 75%

Simply because I wish to use this computer and mine at the same time, without slowdown.

Optimized software has <25% total CPU usage but splits that usage evenly between the four cores. When running multi-core optimized software on only one core, it runs at almost 1/4 of the speed.

Would that be possible?

don't use cpu mining, it's not fast enough, it will take forever to get 0,000001 bitcoin, so it dosen't worth it.

ATI 5870 is about 200 times faster for mining then your Quad Core, and GPU mining doesnt slow your computer, for tasks like internet browsing you would hardly notice the difference.

I don't mine my CPU but this seems a relevant thread for an issue I'm having. I once mined my GPU in OpenCL without any CPU resources being used. Since downloading Catalyst 11.6B I can't mine in OpenCL or Phoenix without 50+% of both of my cores in constant use. Is anyone aware of what causes this and whether or not it's an error?

Yes, it's a bug in windows. Downgrade to 11.6 and/or try different SDK versions (2.1/2.4/2.5)

I got 11.6B in order to try to run two cards without dummy plugs...oh the barriers to mining :P

I use -f120 with Guiminer on my 6950, that prevents any noticeable GPU related slowdowns for me, at only a ~10MH/s hashrate reduction. If it still feels slow, you can try higher numbers.

Bump, wondering if any has solved this issue yet on the GPU side..

to limit cpu you can use battle encoder shirase

I am unable to move this thread to another forum section.

Would like to request a moderator that this thread be moved to the "Technical Support" section.

Any way to limit CPU on a MAC using cgiminer / minerd ?

Edit : you can do it with the option --threads x, where x would be the number of cores used.

This would probably need some support from the miner program to sleep between loops.

You can also adjust the priority of the miner process. This will affect a lot in CPU mining, but hardly none with GPU, FPGA or ASIC mining.

UNIX-like: Use commands like nice, renice or top. Big numbers mean more niceness and less CPU.
Windows: Open the task manager and right-click the miner process to access the priority options. Higher priority means more CPU.

Total CPU load will still show 100 % in use, but when multiple threads or processes are running simultaneously at the same CPU core, the miner program will get less CPU than the other processes, thus making the system more responsive but still not wasting any potential mining power by sleeping when not neccessary.

You can also do it another way and give your miner the maximum priority (making Windows hang up). On Unixes this usually means a negative nice number. This makes sure your CPU miner keeps running decently even if, let's say a web page with a lot of flash advertisements, tend to steal your CPU away from mining process. Or keep the miner at normal and lower those other processes abusing the CPU.

A very early version of a script (but it works) that allow you to run cpu based miners with the CPU usage % of your choice.
It use only windows components so no third party software are needed.
bonus : minerd window is launch on startup and not visible.

This tool can be found on github : https://github.com/szd/cpu-miner-limiter