I knew that Bitcoin would increase my temps. My computer is semi-new and I haven't done much full load testing, but Bitcoin makes my machine rise 20-25 degrees C. It's still safe, at 57...but just curious. Do you all run Bitcoin 24/7, and if so, is it bad to run at 100% usage, at such a temp, whenever the computer is on?
It depends a lot on the cooling capacity of you computer. If your cooling is struggling to keep your core temperature down at 100% load then you're probably going to wear out your fans in the not-too-distant future. If your cooling system isn't breaking a sweat to keep your CPU cool then you probably won't have much issue with mechanical wear.
Also, an idea while studying this earlier. It may be small potatoes at this point, but a scheduler to accomodate different times you want it to run and/or how many processors you want running at once.
For example, it would be nice to have it run on full load while I am busy or at work, while slowing down to one or two processors during my main usage hours. Or for those with a computer that is a bit old or they don't exactly trust, turn the load down at night or when you are not home for safety precautions of temps.
Like I said, a timer/scheduler like that is small potatoes, but at some point I'd really like to see it in the Options menu.
That's not a bad idea. It might just be a better idea to make the load scaling work better by automatically cutting down the number of hashing threads based on the amount of load other system processes are putting on the system. That way, if you weren't using the computer at all the client could suck up all of the cores, but if you sat down and started doing big parallel compiles then it would back off to 1 or 0 cores.
The way that load scaling currently works in client is slightly problematic, in that the 'niceness' of individual processes doesn't affect its IO demand. Since the current BitCoin client is such a monster when it comes to disk access, you'd probably notice a huge responsivity increase on your system if you ionice'd the client.