work drops when BOINC program closed

Questions and Answers : Preferences : work drops when BOINC program closed

Author	Message
shoada Send message Joined: 31 Mar 02 Posts: 3 Credit: 37,393 RAC: 0	Message 407255 - Posted: 26 Aug 2006, 14:50:05 UTC
	I have been running two projects at 100% with dual core processor and BOINC program exited. That worked fine until two weeks ago. Now my production appears to have stopped. I notice that my message file appears to start over each time I enter BOINC program. That is new. I am not running the screen saver, but have the client running 100% cpu in the background 24/7. What changed? I cannot seem to set any preference to get this to keep working. ____________
	ID: 407255 ·

mikey Volunteer tester Send message Joined: 17 Dec 99 Posts: 4215 Credit: 3,474,603 RAC: 0	Message 407303 - Posted: 26 Aug 2006, 16:22:38 UTC - in response to Message 407255. Last modified: 26 Aug 2006, 16:22:48 UTC
	I have been running two projects at 100% with dual core processor and BOINC program exited. That worked fine until two weeks ago. Now my production appears to have stopped. I notice that my message file appears to start over each time I enter BOINC program. That is new. I am not running the screen saver, but have the client running 100% cpu in the background 24/7. What changed? I cannot seem to set any preference to get this to keep working. By exited do you mean minimized to the taskbar? or do you mean you actually exited the program? Do you mean you have 2 instances of Boinc running, each doing a different project? or do you mean you have a dual core/HT machine doing 2 units at once and switching between 2 projects? ____________
	ID: 407303 ·

J D K Volunteer tester Send message Joined: 26 May 04 Posts: 1295 Credit: 311,371 RAC: 0	Message 407352 - Posted: 26 Aug 2006, 17:31:16 UTC
	Goto preferences and set leave in memory to YES. ____________ And the beat goes on Sonny and Cher BOINC Wiki
	ID: 407352 ·

shoada Send message Joined: 31 Mar 02 Posts: 3 Credit: 37,393 RAC: 0	Message 407434 - Posted: 26 Aug 2006, 20:15:24 UTC
	I did have the Seti job set to not stay in memory. I changed that to a YES, but my work is still dropping when I exit BOINC program. To answer the 1st question, I have a dual processor and am running two jobs. I would prefer to have each job run 100% on each processor, but that does not appear to be an option. It appears that every so often the running job stops and the other job begins. I don't seem to have any control over what runs. ____________
	ID: 407434 ·

J D K Volunteer tester Send message Joined: 26 May 04 Posts: 1295 Credit: 311,371 RAC: 0	Message 407467 - Posted: 26 Aug 2006, 20:59:13 UTC - in response to Message 407434.
	I did have the Seti job set to not stay in memory. I changed that to a YES, but my work is still dropping when I exit BOINC program. To answer the 1st question, I have a dual processor and am running two jobs. I would prefer to have each job run 100% on each processor, but that does not appear to be an option. It appears that every so often the running job stops and the other job begins. I don't seem to have any control over what runs. What do you mean by "dropping""" ____________ And the beat goes on Sonny and Cher BOINC Wiki
	ID: 407467 ·

Pooh Bear 27 Volunteer tester Send message Joined: 14 Jul 03 Posts: 3217 Credit: 1,000,061 RAC: 0	Message 407539 - Posted: 26 Aug 2006, 22:02:42 UTC
	Did you upgrade the software a couple of weeks ago? Did you install it differently than before. To have it run in the background, without the Manager running, you need to install as a service, then you can stop the Manager from running, and it will still run in the background. BOINC itself must run, it is the program that does all the scheduling, uploading, downloading, etc. It can not be stopped. As for multi processor, this is kind of a Windows issue. As long as you are getting 100%, when all the processors are running, all is good. It will show 50% each processor on 2, or 25% each on 4. There is nothing wrong, they all add to 100% of processing power. ____________
	ID: 407539 ·

mikey Volunteer tester Send message Joined: 17 Dec 99 Posts: 4215 Credit: 3,474,603 RAC: 0	Message 408155 - Posted: 27 Aug 2006, 14:55:54 UTC - in response to Message 407434.
	I did have the Seti job set to not stay in memory. I changed that to a YES, but my work is still dropping when I exit BOINC program. To answer the 1st question, I have a dual processor and am running two jobs. I would prefer to have each job run 100% on each processor, but that does not appear to be an option. It appears that every so often the running job stops and the other job begins. I don't seem to have any control over what runs. By 2 jobs you do not mean 2 instances of Boinc, correct? You mean 2 different workunits? If the later is correct, then your computer is doing as it should do. The manager controls Boinc and should be giving 100% of each workunit to each processor. These will change depending on the settings you have set for how much time to put into each project you run. For isntance if you want 90% on seti and 10% on Einstein then periodically the manager will switch your computer so over the long run 90% of the time your ocmputer will crunch for Seti and 10% od the time it will crunch for Einstein. The short term numbers will not be accurate!! It is not a perfect piece of software, but over the long run it will come out fine. In the short term you will be off by a couple of percentage points one way or the other. ____________
	ID: 408155 ·

shoada Send message Joined: 31 Mar 02 Posts: 3 Credit: 37,393 RAC: 0	Message 408187 - Posted: 27 Aug 2006, 15:39:53 UTC
	I removed BOINC from my computer, went to the setiathome web site and downloaded and installed BOINC again. It appears to be working now. What I did, as an experiment two weeks ago, was to change Seti to 50% and leave Climate Prediction at 100%. Yesterday I had changed Seti back to 100%. I checked by general pref for both projects and noticed that my general pref for Seti was different for the option to keep in memory, I set Seti to also say YES. I did not change any preferences after loading the BOINC software again today. When I specify Exit on the BOINC manager, the jobs keep running now as they did before. I make note of the progress once a week. I was on vacation last week so it was not checked. When I got back, I noticed that my stats had taken a nose dive on both projects. I will check it again next week to see if my project performance is back up to normal. Seti has shown an average between 190 and 291 most around 250 Clim has shown an average between 294 and 517 most around 430 I am not sure of what causes the big spread. My computer usage does not vary that much. Thanks for the help with this. ____________
	ID: 408187 ·

mikey Volunteer tester Send message Joined: 17 Dec 99 Posts: 4215 Credit: 3,474,603 RAC: 0	Message 411406 - Posted: 30 Aug 2006, 22:37:02 UTC - in response to Message 408187.
	I removed BOINC from my computer, went to the setiathome web site and downloaded and installed BOINC again. It appears to be working now. What I did, as an experiment two weeks ago, was to change Seti to 50% and leave Climate Prediction at 100%. Yesterday I had changed Seti back to 100%. I checked by general pref for both projects and noticed that my general pref for Seti was different for the option to keep in memory, I set Seti to also say YES. This could be part of your problem, you cannot do 100% for more than 1 project when you are splitting your time between multiple projects. You only have 100% of crunching time available, if you want each project to get 50% of your time, you need to put that. You cannot have one project run on one cpu and another project run on the other cpu, right now. Boinc will physically stop crunching on one project and switch to the other based on the numbers you put in. If you want Climate and Seti to each have 50% of your crunching time than you should put 50/50 on the line. Use other numbers if you want something else, but do not exceed 100 for the total. ____________
	ID: 411406 ·

Odysseus Volunteer tester Send message Joined: 26 Jul 99 Posts: 1786 Credit: 3,749,977 RAC: 1,964	Message 411622 - Posted: 31 Aug 2006, 1:56:28 UTC - in response to Message 411406. Last modified: 31 Aug 2006, 2:12:22 UTC
	This could be part of your problem, you cannot do 100% for more than 1 project when you are splitting your time between multiple projects. You only have 100% of crunching time available, if you want each project to get 50% of your time, you need to put that. You cannot have one project run on one cpu and another project run on the other cpu, right now. Boinc will physically stop crunching on one project and switch to the other based on the numbers you put in. If you want Climate and Seti to each have 50% of your crunching time than you should put 50/50 on the line. Use other numbers if you want something else, but do not exceed 100 for the total. Not so. If it makes it easier to think about them to make the total 100, and if your hosts (if more than one) are all attached to the same set of projects, thatâ€™s fine, but itâ€™s not at all necessary. The resource-share numbers are not percentages, but â€˜weightsâ€™. BOINC calculates the percentages from those, according to the projects that host is attached to. For example, at the moment my â€œhomeâ€ (and default) settings are: 100 Einstein@home 100 Pirates@home 100 Seti@home 175 Seti@home Beta 100 SZTAKI Desktop Grid. Note that the only project with anything but the default 100 share is S@h Beta: thatâ€™s the only site where I had to edit the preferences, the others being unchanged. (Not to say I havenâ€™t actually twiddled them before, but had I settled on this allocation before I first started, I could have left them all alone.) My Mac G5 is attached to the first four projects above, so E@h, P@h, & S@h are getting 100/475 = 21% of its CPU time each, while S@h Beta gets 175/475 = 37%. Note that the total is 475, not 575: as far as this machine is concerned, SDG might as well not exist (and its BOINC Managerâ€™s user-total graph doesnâ€™t include any of the credit Iâ€™ve earned there). My G4/733 at workâ€”but still in the â€œhomeâ€ venueâ€”is attached to all the projects except Pirates, so its numbers are the same as the G5â€™s, substituting SDG for P@h. OTOH one of the G4/400s there is only attached to E@h and S@h, so it runs 100/200 = 50% of each. Then thereâ€™s the WinXP/AMD system that actually is in the â€œworkâ€ venue, where E@h has its share set to 300 (and BOINC is set to stop when the systemâ€™s in use). That machine is attached to S@h and SDG as well (I have no â€œworkâ€ venue preferences at all on those projects, so they really are untouched): they get 100/500 = 20% of its time each, while E@h gets 300/500 = 60%. Anyway, my goal is to minimize the number of places I have to change preferences in order to reallocate my resources, but if you find it easier to deal with percentages Iâ€™m sure youâ€™re not alone, and whatever works for you is best. However, if you consider that BOINC has to handle users like me, with varying combinations of hosts and projects, I think youâ€™ll see that a simple percentage system wouldnâ€™t work. Something else to think about: if you had to keep your total at 100, what would happen if you changed the preferences at one or more projects, but then found that another was having an outage, so you couldnâ€™t get in to make it match? It would be unreasonable to expect you to dash back through all your projects and reverse the changes before one of your hosts got an update and stopped with a â€œtotal not 100â€ error! Every BOINC function must be â€˜robustâ€™ WRT lack of availability of updates from any or all projects. ____________
	ID: 411622 ·

Questions and Answers : Preferences : work drops when BOINC program closed