There is a setting in SETI@home (and others) in Computer Preferences that says:

Suspend work if CPU usage is above: 25%
0 means no restriction
Enforced by version 6.10.30+

I cannot find this option in BAM! so all of my computers are only running at 25% (the default setting).

This option needs to be added into the BAM! Work Preferences.

You can change this setting in the Boinc manager. Advanced => Preferences => Processor usage. I believe if you do this under computing preferences at a project, the settings become global after a reboot.

Yes, I know I can override all of the BAM settings by changing it where you described, but that will hard-set all of those preferences, not just the CPU, within the manager, and if I make changes in the BAM Work Preferences it will not update the clients. I would have to go to all of the clients, go into Preferences and click the Clear button to release the settings so it will again be changeable by BAM, but this will also reset the CPU setting back to 25%.

I'm running a number of clients in different locations and I cannot easily go to or remote to them all manually. That is why I use BAM, but BAM needs to add this new option into its work preferences.

I don't know why this defaults to 25%. You would think it would default to 100%. Even if it did default to 100%, there are people that are going to want to change that to a lower setting from within BAM.

"Suspend work if CPU usage is above" is a relatively new feature in BOINC and BAM needs to update their preferences.

I remember reading somewhere that the 25% restriction was made default to encourage new BOINC users to remain as crunchers. I suppose it was felt that a noob noticing his/her computer running at 100% CPU usage would freak them out causing them to abandon BOINC altogether. Cool avatar, BTW.

Did you resolve this without going to each client and adjust the setting ?

I believe BAM is trying to support this option ("Run only when CPU usage is less than" ), but if I change that setting and tell the client to connect to BAM to update, the BOINC client tells me it gets a config from 2009. And I actually changed my settings earlier today. So either BOINC is not handling the received config correctly. Or BAM is sending a wrong config file that is misread somehow.

Starting Boinc. Goes to standard 25%

11-4-2011 0:52:57 General prefs: from http://bam.boincstats.com/ (last modified 22-Dec-2009 01:42:04)
11-4-2011 0:52:57 Host location: none
11-4-2011 0:52:57 General prefs: using your defaults
11-4-2011 0:52:57 Preferences:
11-4-2011 0:52:57 max memory usage when active: 6134.20MB
11-4-2011 0:52:57 max memory usage when idle: 6134.20MB
11-4-2011 0:52:57 max disk usage: 100.00GB
11-4-2011 0:52:57 suspend work if non-BOINC CPU load exceeds 25 %
11-4-2011 0:52:57 (to change preferences, visit the web site of an attached project, or select Preferences in the Manager)

Update BAM settings, setting it first to 50 and save then back to 0 and save to make sure the settings were updated. Tell client ti update from BAM:

11-4-2011 0:53:16 Fetching configuration file from http://bam.boincstats.com/get_project_config.php
11-4-2011 0:53:19 Contacting account manager at http://bam.boincstats.com/
11-4-2011 0:53:20 Account manager: BAM! User-ID: 67081
11-4-2011 0:53:20 Account manager: BAM! Host-ID: 168742
11-4-2011 0:53:20 Account manager: Number of BAM! connections for this host: 290
11-4-2011 0:53:20 Account manager contact succeeded

Starting some heavy calculations:

11-4-2011 0:58:01 Suspending computation - CPU usage is too high

Suspending so the 0 from BAM is not being read...