I know that BOINC versions should not affect the SETI processing, but mine seem to be taking even longer - help!

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I can agree here, with this, my completing WU's are running between 5:02 and 5:18 on a P4 3.4GHz with 4.05/4.12 c.f. 2:30 to 2:45 with 4.03/4.09, my P4 2.0GHz is faring even worse with time upto 8:10 where it used to be just over 5 hours, technical news say's the're investigating.

Just downloaded 4.13. Am running Fedora Core 2
Celeron 1.7GHZ CPU 256RAM...avg. a little over
6 hours 30 mins. Sometimes I think it depends
on the wu. But I don't know how the core client
can affect the finish time of the wu, does anyone
have any insight as to why that may be the case?

Crunching in Chongqing China...

Joe

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You must be seeing variations in work units. The core boinc client doesn't do any science an occupies no cpu time so can't increase or affect the time taken to process a unit.

The comment on the technical news page refers to the large increase in time from V4.03 to V4.05 SETI client, NOT the boinc client.

Ned

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*** My Guide to Compiling Optimised BOINC and SETI Clients ***
*** Download Optimised BOINC and SETI Clients for Linux Here ***

>You must be seeing variations in work units.

Thanks Ned...that's what I thought, variation in wu's.

Joe

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I Think that with SETI client 4.05 we see the variations between WU in a more pronouced way. On my system, with 4.03 all WU finished in about 3 hours. With 4.05 they finished between 3h40 and 4h30 O_O

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SETI@home classic workunits: 1,985 CPU time: 24,567 hours



Professor Desty Nova
Researching Karma the Hard Way

My work units generally took about 11 hours to complete with version 4.03. With 4.05 they are mostly taking 19 hours.

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It's not BOINC 4.13, it's seti client 4.05!

Before (4.03), 6 - 7.5 hrs (much too long already!), now 4.05: 8 - 9 hrs :(
SETI classic 4.5 - 5 hrs (!!!).

...and don't tell me the client computes any more science! It's absolutely the old WU only disguised in XML!

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Aloha, Uli

> It's not BOINC 4.13, it's seti client 4.05!
>
> Before (4.03), 6 - 7.5 hrs (much too long already!), now 4.05: 8 - 9 hrs :(
> SETI classic 4.5 - 5 hrs (!!!).
>
> ...and don't tell me the client computes any more sience! It's absolutely the
> old WU only disguised in XML!
>
>
Yes, I believe that to be correct. I ran a few Seti Classic WU's earlier this week and they still crunch at 2.5 - 3 hours on my laptop. Boinc Seti 4.03 took the same time. Boinc Seti 4.05 take 4 - 5 hours.

If the Boinc Seti project has any kind of version control they should be able to figure out what's causing the increased processing time. Surely they have a "test setup" where they can crunch a unit and verify accuracy and time to crunch with controlled conditions? And I would think they have automated the compile process so the compile options are set (consistent) for each platform.

> Yes, I believe that to be correct.
>

Thanks, JAF.
At least i'm not the only paranoid... ;)

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Aloha, Uli

> I know that BOINC versions should not affect the SETI processing, but mine
> seem to be taking even longer - help!

That is correct. I noticed some differences as well. At one of my boxes a WU normally takes around 7 hours and when I have installed 4.13 it indicates more then 8 hours - so for sure there is a difference!
I also noticed something new for me on another box, the processing time indicated to be approx. 7 hours but a WU takes 8 hours to process. On another box it is the other way around indicates approx 7 but it processes under 7 hours, close to 6 actually.

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Happy crunching

No noticable time differences with 4.13 here.

Ok, for information only ... speculation only ...

The core client (depreciated term, correctly known as The BOINC Work Manager) can affect the total execution times of the science applications. We are now running, or should be running BOINC Work Manager v 4.13 ...

Since the BOINC Work Manager does many of the tasks needed by the science application there has to be communitcation between the science application, in this case SETI@Home v 4.05; if those calls through the API (Application Programming Interface) take more time, then the processing time will rise.

So, if they made a change to a process/function in the BOINC Work Manager and that process/function now takes longer to execute, your total time will rise ... especially if it is a function that is called a lot ...

This is the reason you wait until the application is released before you optimize. You only want to look at places where you can make changes to truly affect the total run time. The bottom line right now is that we do not know exactly where the problem lies and that is what they are trying to determine now ...

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You know what's really bad about this whole long-running-WU thing...

On one of my computers, BOINC has estimated that it will take 10:35:02 to finish a WU.

However, there are currently three finished WUs, and all of them had the following times:

13:47:32
13:27:11
13:13:51

This means that the WUs are actually taking about three hours more to finish than what BOINC is estimating. This is a problem because BOINC uses these estimates to determine how many WUWUWUWUs to download. Since it's underestimating how long it'll take to finish a WU, it's downloading more WUs than it can actually handle. This in turn means that the last few WUWUWUWUs of the batch are going to be returned after the deadline, and thus discarded.

And I can't really think of anything that'll make that stop.

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> And I can't really think of anything that'll make that stop.

Try adjusting your preferences to reduce the number of days to connect to the network.
If this is set too high, then you will have a big stash in your cache, but won't be able to finish them in time.
A reduced value will result in a smaller cache, but more frequent requests.

Just a thought.

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> was taking 9 hrs here now its 10
>
> also when running other programs im noticing that thay have slowed down
> dramaticly, and with windows explorer i have to suspend boinc first for it to
> start up as the system almost stops , this was not a problem on 4.12
>
> Dave
>
Hi Dave are you sure you are running 4.13?
also the running time has beem longer since 4.09
how many wu's have you run in two days?

Timmy

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OT @ Papa Zito.

This may sound like a strange question if you don't know what I'm talking about, but are you Papa Zito from Kingdom of Loathing?

My machine has been crunching with 4.09 for less than 6 hours, with 4.12 it was almost 7 hours, with 4.13 over 7.5 hours... What is going on here ???

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<p><img src="http://boinc.mundayweb.com/seti2/stats.php?userID=1721&amp;trans=off">   <img src="http://seti.mundayweb.com/stats.php?userID=512&amp;trans=off">

> My machine has been crunching with 4.09 for less than 6 hours, with 4.12 it
> was almost 7 hours, with 4.13 over 7.5 hours... What is going on here ???
>

4.13 (using SETI 4.05) seems to be slightly LESS for me. WUs taking 10.5/5.5 hours on my two fastest machines are now averaging 9.75/4.5 hours.

We may be looking at variances in WUs themselves rather than an overall "work engine" issue.

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