After years of inactivity I have re-installed Seti@home here on 6 PC's. I noticed the past days that downloading of workunits is very inefficient. I have to keep forcing each PC manually to do this. If I let Boinc tak care of this, it will easily postpone donwloading for up to 7 or 8 hours, which leaves that PC wihtout workunits for all that time.

I also notice that many workunits are only downloaded partially and just stop at like 90% or so, after which the rest is postponed again. That means sometimes only a few kB need to be downloaded to finish the workunit, but that again is stalled for hours.

How can downloading a file of a few hundred kB take ages nowadays with download speeds of 1.something kBps. These are 1200 baud modem speeds of the 80's!!
Is there no other way of distributing these files? This is such an inefficient use of processor time.

The problem is that one of SETI's storage server's RAID failed and needed to be re-synced. Because of the downtime, everyone is hammering the servers for more work and causing delays like a traffic jam.

Once everyone has gotten their work requests filled, work will flow normally again.


By the way, forcing the traffic to go through using manual intervention causes more stress on the servers preventing other people from getting work, like a Denial of Service attack. It's best just to let BOINC handle the communications on it's own.

If your concern is about keeping your CPUs busy, protect your investment by joining another project or two.