I am trying to understand why I have so many tasks that are pending days after I complete them. I began looking at the wingmen that I was paired up with on a few of the incomplete work units and was really suprised at what I saw. Most of them had average turnaround times that were on the order of a week or more and yet were holding onto dozens of tasks.

Does anyone know why assigned tasks and turnaround times aren't more closely matched? I don't understand why anyone would be assigned more tasks that they could possibly complete before they expire given their average turnaround time.

Thoughts anyone?

I am trying to understand why I have so many tasks that are pending days after I complete them. I began looking at the wingmen that I was paired up with on a few of the incomplete work units and was really suprised at what I saw. Most of them had average turnaround times that were on the order of a week or more and yet were holding onto dozens of tasks.

Does anyone know why assigned tasks and turnaround times aren't more closely matched? I don't understand why anyone would be assigned more tasks that they could possibly complete before they expire given their average turnaround time.

Thoughts anyone?

Well, I'm no expert, but I peeked at a few. One thing to remember is that people can change their settings within BOINC.

Some folks think setting a large cache (up to 10 days) is a good idea considering things like the planned Tuesday maintenance. (I don't want to run out of work!)
Some would rather not let BOINC connect up to the project any old time so they change their connect interval to something that causes their WU's to be reported back in larger "batches."

The three I peeked at look like they all are carrying around a 10 day cache. (Just based on a rough estimate noting that the current workload is fairly consistently 50 credits/WU for now.) And only one of them looked like it was having problems with the work assigned. (But there was an abberration in that it seems to have been "offline" for about 10 days. There was a gap from May 17-May 27 in the work reported.)

As a lot of posters may tell you, pending credit is like money in the bank. You'll eventually get credited for it, so it's not something to be too concerned over.

It's also a relative rule of thumb that you can expect your Pending to average around 3 times your RAC. So considering your host is relatively new (only about 17 days since you added it) having it at 4 times your RAC isn't too out of line.

Your RAC takes about 30 days of steady crunching to get to the actual level that your machine will sustain. The formula "ages" older credits such that your RAC reflects roughly a 30 day window of your crunching. So right now, you're effectively building up to your sustained amount of Pending credit based on how quickly your machine returns results compared to the pace at which the "average" machine in the project returns theirs. While at the same time you're building up your sustained RAC. All based on the bias that the formula has that's currently including, effectively, 13 days of "0" crunching.

Hopefully the experts won't be far behind me with a more concise and succinct explanation. :-)

Welcome to the project and happy crunching.

There is an average turnaround time on the server status page, currently 68.85 hours, and this is recorded by scarecrow in his famous graphs, 30 day graphs to show trend.

I am trying to understand why I have so many tasks that are pending days after I complete them. I began looking at the wingmen that I was paired up with on a few of the incomplete work units and was really suprised at what I saw. Most of them had average turnaround times that were on the order of a week or more and yet were holding onto dozens of tasks.

Does anyone know why assigned tasks and turnaround times aren't more closely matched? I don't understand why anyone would be assigned more tasks that they could possibly complete before they expire given their average turnaround time.

Thoughts anyone?

BOINC uses "spare" processor resources, crunchers give what they can, there is no requirement to crunch 24/7 on dedicated rigs. I am suprised I have no pendings before April 10th, but to see pendings two to four months is common, six months plus is not uncommonm. With a 34K RAC my pendings is just under 80K, well within the norm. That 80K is in the bank, as is often said here. You will eventually get credit due.

Hi,
Pending credit: 9,012.25
Average turnaround time 3.15 days

heinz

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D5400XS V8-Xeon

I have 2 wingmen waiting for me to complete SETI tasks atm. One of these is in progress about 25% done. My average crunching time is around 6 hours on SETI, but I have been doing a lot of AstroPulse recently. My expected time on AP 4.30 is 310 hours.

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Sir Arthur C Clarke 1917-2008

Hello all,

Whilst I have been working with boinc/Seti since 1999 this is my first post, so be gentle with me, ( I am a mechanical engineer and know litle of electronics, computers or programming!) This post is of interest to me since I was producing an RAC of around 1800 a few weeks ago, but this has now dropped to an average of around 1400.

The thread so far has explained the rationale behind this, but I have questions in relation to "Wingmen".

Are we always paired with the same wingman/group?

If so is this related to country or signup date?

and finally, JavaJim says he began looking at his wingmen, how do you identify them and view the wingmens stats?

This is out of curiousity only you will understand.

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Hello all,

Whilst I have been working with boinc/Seti since 1999 this is my first post, so be gentle with me, ( I am a mechanical engineer and know litle of electronics, computers or programming!) This post is of interest to me since I was producing an RAC of around 1800 a few weeks ago, but this has now dropped to an average of around 1400.

The thread so far has explained the rationale behind this, but I have questions in relation to "Wingmen".

Are we always paired with the same wingman/group?

If so is this related to country or signup date?

and finally, JavaJim says he began looking at his wingmen, how do you identify them and view the wingmens stats?

This is out of curiousity only you will understand.

The average pending credit is about 2 million credits.........if you believe some posters..........

But really.........it just depends upon whether you are crunching faster than most.......and given the propensity of fast crunchers to post on these forums......you will see a lot of high pending totals.....
Not to worry.......the higher your pendings are, the better you are doing..........

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

Hello all,

Whilst I have been working with boinc/Seti since 1999 this is my first post, so be gentle with me, ( I am a mechanical engineer and know litle of electronics, computers or programming!) This post is of interest to me since I was producing an RAC of around 1800 a few weeks ago, but this has now dropped to an average of around 1400.

The thread so far has explained the rationale behind this, but I have questions in relation to "Wingmen".

Are we always paired with the same wingman/group?

If so is this related to country or signup date?

and finally, JavaJim says he began looking at his wingmen, how do you identify them and view the wingmens stats?

This is out of curiousity only you will understand.

No, we aren't always paired up with the same machine (though it does happen from time to time). Basically work is assigned out as it is requested.

How to look up your partners? Well, you can go into your pending credit list from your account page. Then click on the work unit id and it will show you all the machines (if any) that have been given the same unit. Then you can click on the computer link for the result that hasn't been sent back yet to see what is going on with them (turn around times, quotas, machine type, os version, etc).

Hope this helps....

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Wendy



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