BOINC client started by BOINC Manager shows to Mac OS X as hanging

[ploppy]

The 'boinc' process started by BOINC Manager eventually shows in Activity Monitor as "not responding". Accordingly, 'spindump' will waste a bit of CPU sampling the supposedly hanging 'boinc' process.

I don't know exactly what triggers the OS to mark a process as "not responding" but I'm sure that it wouldn't happen if the BOINC client would be a proper launchd job. It might also be worth having the BOINC client call setsid() if it isn't started as a launchd job.

tested on 6.2.18 and 6.6.3.

[KSMarksPsych]

Reassigning to Charlie as he's the Mac guy.

[charlief]

I occasionally see Activity Monitor show BOINC Manager as not responding, but I've never seen this for the BOINC client. Note that Activity Monitor often lists BOINC Manager as simply "BOINC" but the client is always listed as "boinc" (all lower case.) I also checked spindump's accumulated hang reports in /Library/Logs/HangReporter/? and found several for BOINCManager (all several months old) but none for boinc.

As I understand it, launchd is used to automatically run daemons from the system. If you run the Make_BOINC_Service.sh script (available from a link here), the client will be launched using launchd at system startup. I'm not aware of a way to use launchd to launch from the BOINC Manager; the Manager uses the standard UNIX fork/execv approach. Also, I' don't understand why creating a separate session for the client would be helpful.

I'm closing this as "can't reproduce" (works for me), but will reopen it if further information warrants. Please respond with further clarification if you feel I have closed this in error.