In article <2que07F14aronU1@uni-berlin.de>, BrianW <brian@nospam.net> wrote:

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.

  [ ... ]

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

Indeed. Applications can't make a clock run slow! You could try installing
something like the free atomic clock sync, which regularly synchronises your
PC clock with a time server.

  [ ... ]

Applications can make the system clock on a PC lose sync, if they
interfere with interrupts.

There are two clocks in a PC which are associated with time-of-day;
one is a battery-backed-up clock (the "hardware" clock), the other,
which is displayed as the system time, is an interrupt driven software
routine (the "software" clock).

At boot time, the BIOS reads the hardware clock and loads the value
into the software clock, where it is updated when the heartbeat
interrupt triggers. If an application disables interrupts for too
long, some of the heartbeat interrupts get lost, and the software
clock loses time.

After a restart, the software clock gets reloaded, which gets things
back in sync for a while.

It appears that either the client or BOINC has a problem. Not a
big one on dedicated crunchers, but it could be on systems also
used for production work.


Gary

-- 
Gary Heston  gheston@hiwaay.net 

Contrary to popular opinion, _not_ everyone loves Raymond.