A few months ago my PPC G5 Mac started occasionally showing tasks with 0% progress. Right now the following...

Progress Status Elapsed Remaining
0.000% Running 4:56:53 ---

Elapsed is increasing, but both Progress and Remaining stay as shown. I have seen tasks that go above 20 hours with no change in Progress and Remaining. Waste of time, so I abort the task, which then pops up with a Computation Error. It's getting more frequent. Been doing Seti for over 12 years and this is the first time I've seen this problem.

Running 6.12.33, and 10.5.8 on the Mac. My PC does not have this problem.

Thoughts appreciated.

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John

Next time you see the symptom, have a look in Activity Monitor to see whether or not the SETI process is actually running.

Rather than aborting the task, maybe try quitting & relaunching BOINC: that often gets things unstuck.

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Got up to a failure this morning - one task running fine, the other as described earlier. Activity showed only one setiathome process running. Quit BOINC, but the one process kept running. Quit that, then restarted BOINC. Now have two processes running. The 'failing' task was reset to zero and is now behaving properly.

So - is this a known problem, or do I have something else going on?

Thanks for the restart tip.

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John

Got up to a failure this morning - one task running fine, the other as described earlier. Activity showed only one setiathome process running. Quit BOINC, but the one process kept running. Quit that, then restarted BOINC. Now have two processes running. The 'failing' task was reset to zero and is now behaving properly.

So - is this a known problem, or do I have something else going on?

Thanks for the restart tip.

Happens once in a blue moon on my boxes. Not sure what causes it.

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So - is this a known problem, or do I have something else going on?

I don't know why it happens on Power Macintosh [AltiVec] (PowerPC G5 ?)

But on Windows + some of AMD CPUs + standard/stock app this is a known problem.
It happens sometimes at the start/restart of task (= new start of SETI stock app) during "Optimal function choice".

If you restart BOINC or just stop the computation ("Snooze")(which exits the SETI app) and then resume the computation
the SETI stock app may be able this time to pass this starting phase ("Optimal function choice" which lasts a few seconds)
and go further on its real business.

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- ALF - "Find out what you don't do well ..... then don't do it!" :)