hey guys

i also posted this in the preferences forum, and OzzFan1 told me to post it here 2, coz it involves linux.

as you can tell from my post and date joined, i'm new at this. Heard about the whole dist. comp. thing from a magazine, so i gave it a go. I am now building up a small amount of credit... of course it's nowhere near what the rest of you all have, but like i said i'm new :)

ok here is my question: my computer is my linux firewall. it's only a celeron 1.7ghz, 512mb ram, running FC4 on a 20gb hdd (about 9gb free - whole dist, coz i'm also a linux newb :). apart from pushing & shaping packets, running squid (transparent cache), & spi firewall, it doesn't do anything else.

right now, seti takes up about 99.7% of the cpu load. i was wondering what other settings or preferences i would need to set, so that i can get the most out of the program. in my prefs page, i have changed the settings as follows:

do while comp is in use: yes
use no more than: 7gb disk space
use no more than: 75% of total disk space
write to disk at most every: 30 secs
use no more than: 95% of total virt. mem.
connect to network every: 1 day

i think that the seti app is set at a nice lvl of -10, but like i said, since my comp doesn't do much else, it takes up most of the time and load, so this really doesn't matter much.

my comp is running fine, before the power blackout in my area yesterday, my comp had been up for about 9 days straight (i only got adsl about 10 days ago, so seti has been running from the start). therefore its safe to say that i shouldn't need to worry about overloading/overheating my cpu.

are these settings ok? is there anything else i should consider about? any help would be appreciated guys.

Thx in advance

Cold E@rth (aka Michael Weeks)

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as you can tell from my post and date joined, i'm new at this. Heard about the whole dist. comp. thing from a magazine, so i gave it a go. I am now building up a small amount of credit... of course it's nowhere near what the rest of you all have, but like i said i'm new :)

Welcome to seti@home and boinc.

ok here is my question: my computer is my linux firewall. it's only a celeron 1.7ghz, 512mb ram, running FC4 on a 20gb hdd (about 9gb free - whole dist, coz i'm also a linux newb :). apart from pushing & shaping packets, running squid (transparent cache), & spi firewall, it doesn't do anything else.
[quote]
I it good hardware config for a firewall and a proxy cache.

[quote]
right now, seti takes up about 99.7% of the cpu load. i was wondering what other settings or preferences i would need to set, so that i can get the most out of the program. in my prefs page, i have changed the settings as follows:

do while comp is in use: yes
use no more than: 7gb disk space
use no more than: 75% of total disk space
write to disk at most every: 30 secs
use no more than: 95% of total virt. mem.
connect to network every: 1 day

Normaly, the default preferences are OK.
But the "connect to network every X days" could be set to 3 or 4 days. If you set it higher, your system will download work for this value, you have entered.
If you set it higher, you have the benefit, that you have enought work, if a outage on the servers occour.
I think, that the parameter "use no more than: 95% of total virt. mem." could be set lower (75 or 50 %), for safety reasons. Your proxy server is memory intensive. So seti would not allocate to much memory. But, seti did not use to much memory, normal about 20 to 30 MBs. So the parameter is only for safety.

i think that the seti app is set at a nice lvl of -10, but like i said, since my comp doesn't do much else, it takes up most of the time and load, so this really doesn't matter much.

The boinc client starts the seti app with a nice level of 19. This means, that the seti app is running on the lowest priority. If a application (for example squid) needs more CPU, the seti app will get lower priortiy, and squid gets the CPU.
This is OK, and you can let it as it is. Normaly squid is not CPU intensive, so the seti app would get the most CPU.

my comp is running fine, before the power blackout in my area yesterday, my comp had been up for about 9 days straight (i only got adsl about 10 days ago, so seti has been running from the start). therefore its safe to say that i shouldn't need to worry about overloading/overheating my cpu.

Normaly, if your system cooling is OK, you don't need worry about overheating. The overloading (CPU and memory) is handeled by the unix scheduler by nice levels.
If your CPU temprature increases to much, and you need to limit the CPU for seti, you could use the tool CPUlimiter (http://marlon80.interfree.it/cpulimit/index.html)

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Hi Cold E@rth,

regarding the tweaking you mentioned i give you the advise to take a closer look at
http://napartst.name or my page http://www.guntec.de/Crunch3r/.

Anything else like "renicing" the app. will allmost do nothing.
If you're concerned to get the maximum out of your CPU, then take a look at those pages. The SETI@Home apps. ther are processing at least 3 to 6 times faster than what you would get using the standard app.

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