Less Bits (Jun 18 2008)

Author	Message
Matt Lebofsky Volunteer moderator Project administrator Project developer Project scientist Send message Joined: 1 Mar 99 Posts: 1444 Credit: 957,058 RAC: 0	Message 770114 - Posted: 18 Jun 2008, 23:16:03 UTC The assimilator queue grew again. The main culprit this time was the NTPCkr - from here on out I'll simply refer to it as the nitpicker - as a reminder this is the program that is pretty much the culmination of all our SETI@home data collection and analysis, i.e. it's the thing that'll find the aliens if they exist. All other analyses so far using SETI@home data were cursory by comparison. Anyway.. we're finding every so often that we have "deep" pixels containing tens of thousands of multiplets, each containing thousands of signals. When my "science status page updater" hits one of these it hangs on for quite a long time, causing a heavy CPU load on the database server as it tries to wade through this flood of signals gathering statistics. My optimizations (mentioned earlier in the week) helped, but not enough. We may devise/implement more. In any case, the heavy nitpicker load made the assimilators slow down. We killed those particular processes and I think we're catching up again. Slowly. So the donation processing suite had been choked for a couple weeks and nobody noticed. This was caused by a suddenly (and silently) more stringent firewall, and masked by several things. We've been getting the donations, just no confirmations. So there's quite a few missing green stars I imagine. Not exactly sure what to do about that just yet. - Matt -- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person -- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude ID: 770114 ·

Dr. C.E.T.I. Send message Joined: 29 Feb 00 Posts: 16019 Credit: 794,685 RAC: 0	Message 770116 - Posted: 18 Jun 2008, 23:19:12 UTC . . . Thanks for the Update Matt - it's Much Appreciated Sir! BOINC Wiki . . . Science Status Page . . . ID: 770116 ·

Uli Volunteer tester Send message Joined: 6 Feb 00 Posts: 10923 Credit: 5,996,015 RAC: 1	Message 770138 - Posted: 18 Jun 2008, 23:53:03 UTC I wasn't sure, if donations just dropped off or if the page was broken. I will try to get better about posting something in the future. Thanks for all your hard work. Pluto will always be a planet to me. Seti Ambassador Not to late to order an Anni Shirt ID: 770138 ·

Dr. C.E.T.I. Send message Joined: 29 Feb 00 Posts: 16019 Credit: 794,685 RAC: 0	Message 770144 - Posted: 18 Jun 2008, 23:57:31 UTC - in response to Message 770138. I wasn't sure, if donations just dropped off or if the page was broken. I will try to get better about posting something in the future. Thanks for all your hard work. . . . works fine for my machine Uli: Donations BOINC Wiki . . . Science Status Page . . . ID: 770144 ·

Mr. Majestic Volunteer tester Send message Joined: 26 Nov 07 Posts: 4752 Credit: 258,845 RAC: 0	Message 770600 - Posted: 20 Jun 2008, 0:38:41 UTC Thanks for keeping us up to date Matt. ID: 770600 ·

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