Martin 53N 1W wrote:

mijikin wrote:

Whenever I run seti (v.4.02) with boinc (v.4.05), my system clock
slows down at a rate of about 5 minutes per hour. My computer is a
Pentium III running Mandrake 9.0. I did not have this problem with
the old seti classic.

Very strange...

It might just be a SETI coincidence and in reality it is your clock
battery that is failing.

Just in case: try checking /var/log/messages for any missed
interrupts. Are you running seti at a high priority?

You could run ntpd to maintain your clock time to one of the public
time sources.

And Mandrake 10.0.1 is a little more recent (;-))

Thanks for replying.

I found out, after I posted, that the hardware clock is not affected, 
i.e. hwclock shows the correct time. It is the clock shown in the KDE 
tray that lags behind. And this occurs when and only when I run boinc.

I also noticed that the computer becomes slightly sluggish when boinc is 
running. For example, when I play kmines, the mouse does not respond as 
quickly.

As you suggested, I checked /var/log/messages but did not see anything 
abnormal.

As shown in the top screen, seti and boinc run with a nice value of 19 
and 0 respectively. I did try to run boinc with nice=19 but that did 
not make any difference. 

For a variety of reasons, upgrading to a more recent version of mdk is 
not an option right now.

I'm far from being fluent with Linux, so if you or anybody else know of 
a way to at least diagnose the problem, I will be grateful.