i don't understand...each job says 50% but seti gets no time at all unless i suspend climate. i just installed 1GB of memory so it's not that. any ideas?

thanks,
lenette

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Intelligence is not necessarily an evolutionary advantage

i don't understand...each job says 50% but seti gets no time at all unless i suspend climate. i just installed 1GB of memory so it's not that. any ideas?

thanks,
lenette

What is the deadline for CPDN?
How many hours are left?
What does the time_stats section of the client_state.xml file look like?
What is the long_term_debt of each project?

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BOINC WIKI

I have exactly the same problem. I have set my resource share so that climate is supposed to get 13% and set 87%, but in reality climate is getting 7 times the average work being done. the problem i think is that BOINC is using the deadlines to determine what to run, and is ignoring the resource share. seti files typically have a relaxed deadline, typically a month for me, and climate is giving its files a year. However each seti file has a much smaller amount of work, typically for me anything between 1/1000 and 1/200 of the amount of work in the climate files. The only possible solutions are for the different applications to use consistent ratios of work required to deadlines, or for BOINC to introduce different scheduling mechanisms (maybe user configurable). Certainly the resource share currently is not operating. BTW I am running 5.8.16 under Windows XP SP2.

Graham Starkey

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I have exactly the same problem. I have set my resource share so that climate is supposed to get 13% and set 87%, but in reality climate is getting 7 times the average work being done. the problem i think is that BOINC is using the deadlines to determine what to run, and is ignoring the resource share. seti files typically have a relaxed deadline, typically a month for me, and climate is giving its files a year. However each seti file has a much smaller amount of work, typically for me anything between 1/1000 and 1/200 of the amount of work in the climate files. The only possible solutions are for the different applications to use consistent ratios of work required to deadlines, or for BOINC to introduce different scheduling mechanisms (maybe user configurable). Certainly the resource share currently is not operating. BTW I am running 5.8.16 under Windows XP SP2.

Graham Starkey

Try to see in your messages panel if it says anything about your computer being overcommitted. If so, your machine needs to crunch some workunits in other prjects than SETI, to get the resource share 'corrected'. In my case it has happened several times, but the problem resolves itself.

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I have exactly the same problem. I have set my resource share so that climate is supposed to get 13% and set 87%, but in reality climate is getting 7 times the average work being done. the problem i think is that BOINC is using the deadlines to determine what to run, and is ignoring the resource share. seti files typically have a relaxed deadline, typically a month for me, and climate is giving its files a year. However each seti file has a much smaller amount of work, typically for me anything between 1/1000 and 1/200 of the amount of work in the climate files. The only possible solutions are for the different applications to use consistent ratios of work required to deadlines, or for BOINC to introduce different scheduling mechanisms (maybe user configurable). Certainly the resource share currently is not operating. BTW I am running 5.8.16 under Windows XP SP2.

Graham Starkey

Yes, but when the CPDN task is done, you will do 100% S@H for a few months to make up. No one ever said that the Long Term Debt would balance things out over the short run. Most machines will be unable to complete a CPDN task on time with a 13% share. I actually have a couple of computers that are in EDF on CPDN with no other work expected to be downloaded for a few months, but I know that those machines will take a vacation from CPDN once that is done.

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BOINC WIKI

I started with a 50-50 split some time back but starting winding down the resource share for climate in a vain attempt to reduce the dominance of climate. And in answer to the previous response, I have no unusual msgs about overcommits or anything else. BOINC is supremely happy.

Graham

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One other comment, and I doubt that there's any connection. I have NEVER had a climate file run to completion. It always errors out at some time before the year is out. Sometime early on, sometimes later.

Graham

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OK, you may not believe this, but, reducing the resource share of a project that is already running in EDF is a way of increasing the time that will be spent on that project in the near term (In the long term, of course, it should get less work).

One thing that is possibly happening to you is that S@H is out of work, or busy, and your host is out of work. The host then looks for another project that you are attached to to fetch work from - even if that project has too low of an LTD to be asked normally. BOINC then gets work from that project, and promptly goes into EDF until the task is done.

If all of your CPDN results error out, your host may be incapable of doing work for the project. Mostly CPDN needs completed runs as the uploaded results for a partialy completed run are not as completely uploaded.

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BOINC WIKI

I can put to bed the thought that maybe my hosts have run out of work, or that I am unable to get a S@H file in time. I've hardly ever seen any time when there isn't at least one S@H file sitting there.

Graham

BTW, WTF is EDF?

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Earliest Deadline First mode. The standard work scheduling mode is Round Robin (aka Highest Debt First mode).

Another way of expressing this situation is that even though CPDN has very long deadlines, it takes a pretty good chunk of that deadline to complete the model even if you are running it full time exclusively. This is why even with equal shares BOINC might give the impression it's 'ignoring' the other projects.

Therefore when you cut back on the resource share for it, BOINC must give it more time runtime in the short term in order to make sure it can get it done on time. It does that by going into EDF mode, which in this case is kind of misleading since the dealine may actually by farther out in time chronologically. What it effectively means is the percentage of time you have told BOINC it should give to CPDN is insufficient to be able to make that deadline and still give the other projects onboard the runtime they would get in Round Robin mode.

Another factor which can make this effect worse is if you don't run your host full time and only crunch for part of the day. Obviously now BOINC has even less uptime to work with to meet the CPDN deadline with the small resource share, so would be even less inclined to DL work from the other projects than it would if run 24/7.

As John said, to make up for this and bring the actual runtimes back into compliance with the resource share, BOINC will virtually ignore CPDN for an extended period of time after it completes a model, while it runs the other projects you have until all that accumulated Long Term Debt is paid back.

You might have to look over a time interval of six months to a year or more to see that it actually did, depending on your host speed and how many projects you run. The problem is none of the stat sites maintain graphic representations of your hosts performance which show that except for the combined Host Totals.

HTH,

Alinator

wow. thanks everyone - i had no idea the answer would be so complicated, but i think i understand. What i've been doing is running Climate at night with Folding. When folding runs with seti it takes all the resources, but watching it with climate, they both seem to run, but climate runs slower (about 1/2 speed).
Then during the day i suspend both and run Seti alone.

does anyone see any problems with that?]

thanks again,
Lenette

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Intelligence is not necessarily an evolutionary advantage

wow. thanks everyone - i had no idea the answer would be so complicated, but i think i understand. What i've been doing is running Climate at night with Folding. When folding runs with seti it takes all the resources, but watching it with climate, they both seem to run, but climate runs slower (about 1/2 speed).
Then during the day i suspend both and run Seti alone.

does anyone see any problems with that?]

thanks again,
Lenette

You will get a reduced set of time stats when you do this. In particular, there is one that tracks the CPU fraction that BOINC is getting - and it will be about 0.66 if CPDN is getting any time at all with Folding. This will increase the apparent time to completion of all BOINC tasks. In general DC projects on different platforms tend not to play well together.

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BOINC WIKI

wow. thanks everyone - i had no idea the answer would be so complicated, but i think i understand. What i've been doing is running Climate at night with Folding. When folding runs with seti it takes all the resources, but watching it with climate, they both seem to run, but climate runs slower (about 1/2 speed).
Then during the day i suspend both and run Seti alone.

does anyone see any problems with that?]

thanks again,
Lenette

I have found that setting the resource shares and letting Boinc manage the time on a computer that runs constantly works just fine and everything gets done in time.

On the other hand, I keep a closer eye on my laptop that I use for work, school and travel because it is sometimes subjected to many hours of downtime during transit. If I lose a day in travel I will even suspend a project based on due date and time whenever I am able to power my laptop back up.

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