Hi

Rach, i would disable network access tommorrow evening so we will have one more day worth.
Because the outage starts monday at 02.00 houres.

greetz from Germany
Mike

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With each crime and every kindness we birth our future.

Downloaded more wu's.I now have 72 wu's .I do about 16-17 a day so 72 will last 4 and a half days.Before I would of run out around the time the outage would end so downloaded another 20 just in case.

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......In Space No One Can Hear You Scream......

Got 50 WUs for my main computer and enough WUs for other computers as well. No need for panicing for me. At least IF the outage will last as long as they predicted... Otherwise, panic will arive for most of us I think.

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<img src="http://www.boincstats.com/stats/banner.php?cpid=d2319b8f0ad14565556d0ba45b64e779">

Hey John,

if you don't want that old crappy pile of junk, I will gladly take it off your hands for you. I would hate for a fellow Boincer to be burdened with such a piece of junk. LOL

Jim

> Please forgive me for my inexperience on this -
>
> My (pile of junk!) currently takes 10 hours to process a work unit. I had my
> general and home preferences set to contact every 0.1 days - this meant a new
> work unit arrived a couple of hours before the old one had been completed.
> I've just re-set general and home preferences to 2 days - will this carry me
> over the shut-down without running out of work?
>
> P.S. Within the next couple of weeks,(this pile of junk)machine will be
> history!
> Pile of junk = 2.4Ghz Celeron + 128MB RAM.
> New machine = 3.0GHz Pentium + 512MB RAM
>

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on 3 of my 4 machines I have both SAH and CPDN running. if by chance i run out of work on SAH, my machines will automagically start working on CPDN, thereby keeping my computers busy at all times.

> Got 50 WUs for my main computer and enough WUs for other computers as well. No
> need for panicing for me. At least IF the outage will last as long as they
> predicted... Otherwise, panic will arive for most of us I think.
>

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OK. I changed my preferences from 0.1 days to 3 days. The server has given me 20 (!) WUs ......... but I only 'crunch' one every 10 hours!
I've got more than enough work to see me through the outage!

I've restored my preferences back to 0.1 days now, and I've disabled internet access from my PC while I crunch away....
If I restore internet access now, will the server just upload completed stuff without giving me more WUs?

I'll be migrating PCs soon and I don't want to 'lose' more than 1 WU when I actually close down 1 PC and fire up the next...

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> I've restored my preferences back to 0.1 days now, and I've disabled internet
> access from my PC while I crunch away....
> If I restore internet access now, will the server just upload completed stuff
> without giving me more WUs?

Owch! Since you've set your preferences back down very low again you can leave your computer connected to the 'net. It won't try to get any more new WU's 'till you are back down to one or two left and then it will only give you one or two again.

The source of this problem is that they system attempts to calculate how many WU's you can process in a set timeframe based on highly disputed benchmarks instead of looking at your actual crunching time. It's usually wrong, sometimes in a big way like your example. It would be nice if a weighted average time to complete a WU was tracked for each host. If that were factored against the time period set by the user the process would work much more accurately.

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> > I've restored my preferences back to 0.1 days now, and I've disabled
> internet
> > access from my PC while I crunch away....
> > If I restore internet access now, will the server just upload completed
> stuff
> > without giving me more WUs?
>
> Owch! Since you've set your preferences back down very low again you can leave
> your computer connected to the 'net. It won't try to get any more new WU's
> 'till you are back down to one or two left and then it will only give you one
> or two again.
>
> The source of this problem is that they system attempts to calculate how many
> WU's you can process in a set timeframe based on highly disputed benchmarks
> instead of looking at your actual crunching time. It's usually wrong,
> sometimes in a big way like your example. It would be nice if a weighted
> average time to complete a WU was tracked for each host. If that were
> factored against the time period set by the user the process would work much
> more accurately.
>
Example my computer does a wu in about 1 hour and 50 minutes and it estimates the time to be 4 hours and 24 minutes.

It is more than double.

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Red Bull Air Racing

Gas price by zip at Seti

Ok - I need some help with this...where do I locate the estimated time to complete? I've looked all over my profile, my computer, and even looked in the schedule xml files...

Thanks,
C

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Join Team MacNN

> Ok - I need some help with this...where do I locate the estimated time to
> complete? I've looked all over my profile, my computer, and even looked in
> the schedule xml files...
>
> Thanks,
> C
>

It is in "Your Account" "Preferences - General" "Network usage - connect every xx days"

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BOINC WIKI

> Ok - I need some help with this...where do I locate the estimated time to
> complete? I've looked all over my profile, my computer, and even looked in
> the schedule xml files...
>
> Thanks,
> C

Its in BOINC's Work tab, its the "To Completion" column for waiting work.

> > I've restored my preferences back to 0.1 days now, and I've disabled
> internet
> > access from my PC while I crunch away....
> > If I restore internet access now, will the server just upload completed
> stuff
> > without giving me more WUs?
>
> Owch! Since you've set your preferences back down very low again you can leave
> your computer connected to the 'net. It won't try to get any more new WU's
> 'till you are back down to one or two left and then it will only give you one
> or two again.
>
> The source of this problem is that they system attempts to calculate how many
> WU's you can process in a set timeframe based on highly disputed benchmarks
> instead of looking at your actual crunching time. It's usually wrong,
> sometimes in a big way like your example. It would be nice if a weighted
> average time to complete a WU was tracked for each host. If that were
> factored against the time period set by the user the process would work much
> more accurately.
>
Thanks David - connected back to the net now!
I agree with your point on the benchmarks - 'Time to Completion' is always stated as 6hrs 21mins but actual time to complete is 10hrs + a few minutes in my case....

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There's certainly something strange going on with your PC, John!
You're claiming somthing like 100+ credits for every WU. A celeron such as yours shouldn't really be taking 30,000+ CPU secs to do a WU.
It's possible the small memory you have is causing this - maybe your PC is paging like hell all the time? Is the hard drive light always on?

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<img border="0" src="http://boinc.mundayweb.com/one/stats.php?userID=268&amp;prj=1&amp;trans=off" /><img border="0" src="http://boinc.mundayweb.com/one/stats.php?userID=268&amp;prj=4&amp;trans=off" />

> > Ok - I need some help with this...where do I locate the estimated time
> to
> > complete? I've looked all over my profile, my computer, and even looked
> in
> > the schedule xml files...
> >
> > Thanks,
> > C
>
> Its in BOINC's Work tab, its the "To Completion" column for waiting work.
>
>
>
You need to load BoincView and there in the work tab you will find the time to complete.

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Red Bull Air Racing

Gas price by zip at Seti

> There's certainly something strange going on with your PC, John!
> You're claiming somthing like 100+ credits for every WU. A celeron such as
> yours shouldn't really be taking 30,000+ CPU secs to do a WU.
> It's possible the small memory you have is causing this - maybe your PC is
> paging like hell all the time? Is the hard drive light always on?
>
>
Hard drive light is only on when CPU is doing stuff other than BOINC. From earlier discussions, I'm pretty damn certain it's my lack of RAM causing the long 'crunch' times.
This pile of junk only has 128MB of RAM installed.....and 16 of that is booked for video/graphics! Non-BOINC related, it also has a read only CD/DVD drive + 40GB hard drive.
I've learnt my lesson the hard way - what seemed like a good machine when I first started has turned out to be a turkey!

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I think it's a little unfair to say that - a celeron 2400 is not at all a bad cpu on its own. I certainly think the RAM is too small, and that is causing more problems than anything else - even an increase to 256Mb would help tremendously in its performance.
A celeron 2400 will perform any ordinary PC task perfectly well.
I really think there its either your RAM or something in your setup that is wrong. Possibly some virus or adware?

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<img border="0" src="http://boinc.mundayweb.com/one/stats.php?userID=268&amp;prj=1&amp;trans=off" /><img border="0" src="http://boinc.mundayweb.com/one/stats.php?userID=268&amp;prj=4&amp;trans=off" />

> I think it's a little unfair to say that - a celeron 2400 is not at all a bad
> cpu on its own. I certainly think the RAM is too small, and that is causing
> more problems than anything else - even an increase to 256Mb would help
> tremendously in its performance.
> A celeron 2400 will perform any ordinary PC task perfectly well.
> I really think there its either your RAM or something in your setup that is
> wrong. Possibly some virus or adware?
>
>
>
I probably was sounding a bit unfair!
This machine is the first one I have ever bought (back in April 2004) - the last one I worked on was back in the mid-1980's! That was a DEC Rainbow - 256k of RAM (upgraded from it's original 128k!), a 20MB hard disk partitioned in two (half running under CP/M, and the other half running under MS-DOS v2.02), and (fanfare of trumpets!) a choice of monitors! - green on black or amber on black!

I think I need to upgrade because I would like a CD/DVD writer, more hard disk space and more RAM - so why not go the whole hog and have a Pentium 4 @ 3GHz ?

I have Norton Internet Security installed on the current machine and use AdAware 6 to do regular scans - so viruses/adware are not the problem. If anything, my security is tighter than a nun's knickers! I've also done a lot of housekeeping on my set-up so RAM shortage has to be the root cause of slow crunching....

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A couple of other items - when I download WU's, the expected completion time is always shown as 6hrs 16mins.
Also, I do not run the BOINC screensaver - prefer to run with no screensaver and monitor turn-off after 5 mins.....

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My expected time say 6 hours and 45 mins when they take 3 hours and 30 mins( for 2)ht.

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......In Space No One Can Hear You Scream......

> A couple of other items - when I download WU's, the expected completion time
> is always shown as 6hrs 16mins.
> Also, I do not run the BOINC screensaver - prefer to run with no screensaver
> and monitor turn-off after 5 mins.....
>

Same here.No screensaver and screen off after 2 mins.

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......In Space No One Can Hear You Scream......