How long is too long to wait for new work units?

I finished my last setiathome work unit a coupla days ago, but I have not received any new work units. Last time this happened, I did a ResetProject and that fixed it. But I do not like to do that all the time.

Meanwhile, my machine is crunching away on three climate prediction work units and one protein folding work unit. It has 4 more protein folding work units as well, waiting to run. As it finishes protein folding work units, it gets more. But for some reason, not more setiathome ones. I notice on the status page that all servers are up.

My error log has only the following kind of thing in it:

2005-10-13 00:15:07 [SETI@home] URL http://setiboincdata.ssl.berkeley.edu/sah_cgi/file_upload_handler: error -113
2005-10-13 10:51:32 [SETI@home] Deferring communication with project for 10 minutes and 5 seconds
2005-10-14 10:10:36 [SETI@home] Deferring communication with project for 10 minutes and 5 seconds
2005-10-14 22:31:59 [SETI@home] Deferring communication with project for 10 minutes and 5 seconds
2005-10-15 09:06:23 [SETI@home] Deferring communication with project for 10 minutes and 5 seconds
2005-10-15 12:20:00 [SETI@home] Deferring communication with project for 10 minutes and 5 seconds

The "Deferring" ones are probably related to my pressing "Update" button on the boincmgr program after selecting SETI@home. But it does not get anything downloaded.

trillian:boinc[~/projects/setiathome.berkeley.edu]$ ls -l
total 7216
-rwxrwxrwx 1 boinc boinc 7375729 Oct 4 07:51 setiathome_4.02_i686-pc-linux-gnu

is all that is in the boinc/projects directory for setiathome. No work units.

Should I just be patient, or is something wrong?

How long should I be patiend before deciding something is wrong.

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a -133 error means that it wasn't able to resolve the name (to do with dns, converting names to numbers)

try restarting the computer

if that doesn't work then try rebooting your router if you use one

more information about your network setup would be helpful if the above don't solve the problem

post back with your results

a -133 error means that it wasn't able to resolve the name (to do with dns, converting names to numbers)

try restarting the computer

if that doesn't work then try rebooting your router if you use one

more information about your network setup would be helpful if the above don't solve the problem

post back with your results

Restarting a computer to fix a DNS problem is no way to fix a problem. At worst, one might restart the name server. In fact, I have done neither.

That particular error was of no significance, indicating that the name server could not resolve the name before the timeout (because my Internet connection is demand-dialed and had hung up). That tends to resolve in a minute or less because that is how long it takes to dial up.

I do not use a router with this machine. This machine is a router for my other machine, but that is a separate issue. The other machine has just as much trouble with getting setiathome work units as this one does.

The problem is simply that BOINC is not interested in downloading setiathome work units, at least compared with climate prediction or protein folding. Even when all projects have work units, BOINC does not work well, sometimes dispatching fewer than the maximum work units allowed (4, in my case), and sometimes more (6 or maybe 7) sometimes. Also, either boinc or boincmgr is sick, too, attributing work to the wrong work units; e.g, crediting time to a paused work unit and not to one that is actually running, or crediting time for more than one work unit to one of them.

After a few more days, it started downloading and running setiathome work units again.

I think the BOINC client, at least 4.43 (if that is the most recent one for Linux systems) and all the previous Linux ones is a very sick puppy.

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