3 BOINC Questions / Complaints

Message boards : Number crunching : 3 BOINC Questions / Complaints
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Message 15750 - Posted: 20 Aug 2004, 6:55:32 UTC

Has anyone else experienced BOINC eating up processor while doing something else in the past couple of days, even though its set to run "based on preferences" & peferences are to only do work when PC is not in use?
I have, and wonder if it has to do with the project being 'down' ("It blew up again?!?!") & not having access to the online preferences DB. Very uncool to have to manually "suspend" whenever I'm trying to do... well anything on my PC lately.

Also, this whole $#!+ on the dialup-guy attitude is getting old. What's the point of having "Confirm before connecting to Internet? (matters only if you use a modem): yes" when it's as useful as a Twinkie shoved in your ear? (Yes, I have been using the "Disable BOINC network access" setting manually & the way I see it if they can code in that setting, they should be able to have it 'confirm access' ala... well, every other freaking program I've ever used with net access. Likewise with "Disconnect when done" being a setting that works, they obvoiusly have a (weak) grasp on protocols & init strings).
Please fix this!

And finally, has this struggle been redeeming in the least??? So far, n-o, NO! I've been BOINCing for about a month now (done about 15-20 WU) & have yet too see a single 'Credit'. Yes I know its more complicated than the # of work units, involving processing power (1Ghz P3m & 1Gb mem) & algebraic equations, on top of meeting a 'deadline' but I think I would have earned @ least 1 freaking credit by now.

AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
/rant

To clarify, The 3 Questions are:
1.) Can anyone explain why BOINC ignored my running prefs as of late?
2.) Why hasn't the "Confirm before connecting to Internet?" setting ever worked(or been fixed)?
3.) Where are my credits for completed WUs?

/new rant
WHAT WAS WRONG WITH S@H THAT WARRANTED THIS HORRIBLE SOCIAL EXPERIMENT OF BAD PROGRAMMING TO BE THRUST UPON US? AT LEAST IT WORKED AS ADVERTISED!
/new rant
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Profile Toby
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Message 15759 - Posted: 20 Aug 2004, 7:45:07 UTC - in response to Message 15750.  

> To clarify, The 3 Questions are:
> 1.) Can anyone explain why BOINC ignored my running prefs as of late?

Maybe they are trying to sneak in a little extra CPU time :) You CAN leave BOINC running while you do other things, you know... It only uses CPU cycles that would otherwise go unclaimed by other programs. I leave it running while programming, watching videos and playing games. I see no degredation in performance whatsoever. Not much seti@home work gets done while I'm playing Doom 3 but my framerate does not suffer.

> 2.) Why hasn't the "Confirm before connecting to Internet?" setting ever
> worked(or been fixed)?

This problem has been seen before and is no doubt on their list of bug fixes. It is quite likely that it is fixed in version 4 which I'm hoping they will get out sometime in the near future.

> 3.) Where are my credits for completed WUs?

Hope you are in this "for the science" and not just the credit because otherwise you are about to be rather pissed off :) They have been having major problems with their servers. Both software related (bugs, etc) and hardware (RAID failure, bad stick of RAM and such nasty things). Long story short, anything you have crunched in the last week is gone. This is due to the RAID failure and them having to restore the database from a backup copy. Anything done before that is probably still awaiting 'verification'. At first the servers were completely overloaded and now with their new storage system coming online (and failing) they haven't had the full project up and running at all in the last few weeks.

> /new rant
> WHAT WAS WRONG WITH S@H THAT WARRANTED THIS HORRIBLE SOCIAL EXPERIMENT OF BAD
> PROGRAMMING TO BE THRUST UPON US? AT LEAST IT WORKED AS ADVERTISED!
> /new rant

LOL! You obviously weren't around when the original seti@home was released! There were problems JUST like this for the first several months. You also can't forget the major bandwidth crisis of a couple of years back when people had trouble getting work units for over a month. What we have been seeing for the last couple of years is a highly polished system that has been tuned and tweaked over the years.

However, a new system WAS needed. The old design was not designed to be scalable or secure. The seti-classic system did nothing to discourage cheating and many people took advantage of this. Also, we were giving them WAY more CPU power than they could actually use. seti-classic was/is sending work units out dozens of times after that unit had already been processed. They did this just to keep us users happy since crunching users = happy users. BOINC is designed to let you participate in multiple projects at the same time. Work units are only sent out as many times as is needed for verification (3 times in the case of seti@home). If one project runs out of work, you will automatically get work from another project that you have signed up for.

So just hang in there for a couple more weeks and I think they will have the wrinkles ironed out. Check out predictor@home if you want another BOINC project to work on for now.



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Message 15772 - Posted: 20 Aug 2004, 8:35:35 UTC - in response to Message 15759.  

I remeber that time! That was horrible, worst then now and NO news from Berkeley! Not like now, official news, posts from Rom and Matt ...

> LOL! You obviously weren't around when the original seti@home was released!
> There were problems JUST like this for the first several months. You also
> can't forget the major bandwidth crisis of a couple of years back when people
> had trouble getting work units for over a month. What we have been seeing for
> the last couple of years is a highly polished system that has been tuned and
> tweaked over the years.



Try WAP user info http://slavko.sk/wap/seti
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Message boards : Number crunching : 3 BOINC Questions / Complaints


 
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