Quick note as I gotta catch a bus..

Wow - what a mess. I think we're in the middle of our biggest outage recovery to date, and it's breaking everything. The good news is we're coming into some newer hardware which we'll get on line to help somehow.

See Eric's thread in the Staff Blog. He's been working overtime getting a new frankenstein machine together to act as another upload/download server and reduce the load on bruno. The scheduling server (galileo) has been choking - I just now moved all that over to bruno as well. So we may retire galileo soon, too. Jeff has been going nuts trying to track down errors in validator/assimilator code so we can get those on line as well. And our old friend "slow feeder query" is back, probably just being aggravated by the heavy load.

Gotta go..

- Matt

would it help if everybody stop asking for new work ?

Anything I should be doing from my end, or is this part of the general mess already underway?

You guys do an awesome job and I hope that the work we all do helping to process the work units results in something. But, is it my understanding from the forums that you rely on one to three servers to upload/download units and process them? With no backup servers? A single server down should not have resulted in a 2 week or more downtime. I have just now started getting work, but my uploads are not working. We understand that it is based on donations, but a project this large should have backup servers in place before operating.. Can we as a community petition Sun to donate more server hardware to enhance the program?

"I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me

You guys do an awesome job and I hope that the work we all do helping to process the work units results in something. But, is it my understanding from the forums that you rely on one to three servers to upload/download units and process them? With no backup servers? A single server down should not have resulted in a 2 week or more downtime. I have just now started getting work, but my uploads are not working. We understand that it is based on donations, but a project this large should have backup servers in place before operating.. Can we as a community petition Sun to donate more server hardware to enhance the program?

Hi divedude and welcome to the boards. :-)

Yes, you have got it right, they are operating on a shoestring, all relied on money and hardware donations. They don't have any grants, and the failings of the servers we have seen here the past weeks are a result of working with old, obsolete hardware. They got the Thumper from Sun last year, but it was a beta test model and the one they got to replace Thumper was not a donation, they got it for a reduced price. So what they have to work with at the moment is donated hardware as it seems that the old servers are giving up one by one. Of fatigue, I suppose.

And no, they don't have any backup servers, hence the long outages and difficulties the past weeks.

So all donations are welcome, money and usable hardware. You can see their budget here.

In case you would like to donate money please click on the link in my sig. Thank you.

would it help if everybody stop asking for new work ?

would it help if everybody stop asking for new work ?

While a noble effort, you have no chance in getting that level of cooperation.

I agree with what I've seen mentioned elsewhere, that the projects need an additional throttle mechanism built into BOINC; a "break glass" that is only performed in dire circumstances... Something that puts a little more control into their hands to get wildly out of control processes back in control quicker.

would it help if everybody stop asking for new work ?

It might help but as noted elsewhere its not likely to happen.
I have 5 PCs doing BOINC.......I have shut down BOINC on 4 of
the 5 and left just the 1 running BOINC ...my "canary" if you like
......its not much but every little bit will help get things
back to normal.......

would it help if everybody stop asking for new work ?

While a noble effort, you have no chance in getting that level of cooperation.

I agree with what I've seen mentioned elsewhere, that the projects need an additional throttle mechanism built into BOINC; a "break glass" that is only performed in dire circumstances... Something that puts a little more control into their hands to get wildly out of control processes back in control quicker.

I'm no network expert, but how about simply firewalling out half of the internet? That might relieve the load on the servers sufficiently that they could achieve some reasonable throughput and clear some of the backlogue. A bit tough on the half that's firewalled, but the chunk of IP addresses allowed through could be changed every few hours to give everyone a chance.

would it help if everybody stop asking for new work ?

While a noble effort, you have no chance in getting that level of cooperation.

I agree with what I've seen mentioned elsewhere, that the projects need an additional throttle mechanism built into BOINC...