hi to all ive been running boinc for a few weeks now and i just cant believe how appaling the software is not so much the crashing or disconnecting but it does come with tools and imm allowed to set the processor usage and the amount of memory and hard drive ammount yet it dosent use these settings and runs so slow so if the set up was altered so as my settings were correct the processing of tasks would take more than half the time to do the caculations as to the understanding that the system is not being used by me the processor usage could be useing 100% if i wanted it to along with the alocated memory and hard drive space set by me this would increase overall task compleation x fold noting that i so far have noted that one second seems to take hours and i have to say that so far from what ive seen and expereanced the system is holy inadiquite for it perpouse so i request respectivly that some software engineering be applied to the system immedatly for all our sakes and then when i leave my system on for all to use i can then garentee both the time cycles and the job gets done efficantly and that time runs the same way we all measure time

Groovecutter

Ever heard of punctuation?

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Punctuation would certainly help.
I THINK what groovecuter is saying:
He sees tools that allow him to set the disk and memory usage, but these settings aren't followed.
Then there is the performance, work takes far longer to run than he expected.
There may be more comments and questions, but the lack of punctuation makes it difficult to see where one clause ends and the next begins.

Taking the first point - the "tools" are settings that determine the maximum or minimum for a given parameter - most are maxima. For example setting "use 100% of memory" means "use up to 100% of the available RAM on this computer".
Tasks do take a long time to run - on your system I would expect a typical short task to take a couple of hours if you have "display graphics" and screen saver turned off, if those are turned on the time will increase by between two and ten fold.

I've had a look at your results - two of the three tasks reported have failed for the same reason - insufficient disk space. SETI@Home needs disc space to store the applications, the tasks, and the results. As a starting point I would allocate something like 100Mb.

The easiest thing for you to do is to return the seeting you have fiddled with to their default values - they have been tested on many tens (hundreds) of thousands of users and have been shown to be a good working average.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Tour run times seem comparable to your CPU, different projects take different times, different computers take different times.

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groovecutter, I wouldn't worry about non-helpful replies about punctuation, as those sort of people are really useless most of the time anyway (yes people like that really to P*** me right off as they arn't even trying to be helpful), but increasing the amount of disk space used would be my first move (as Rob stated), personally with today hard drives I'd set 1GB there and then see if those errors disappear. ;-)

Also if you're using a stock HSF within a poorly ventilated case that won't help either.

Cheers.

groovecutter, I wouldn't worry about non-helpful replies about punctuation, as those sort of people are really useless most of the time anyway (yes people like that really to P*** me right off as they arn't even trying to be helpful)

It's difficult to be helpful if you can't figure out what the problem is.


EDIT-- and how is it the author in the thread is groovecutter, but in the Number Crunching forum list it's Bernie Vine???

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Grant
Darwin NT

EDIT-- and how is it the author in the thread is groovecutter, but in the Number Crunching forum list it's Bernie Vine???

Because i red-x'd the post because it wasn't on topic to the Android thread that was posted in, Mods like everyone else can make new threads, they can also move posts to different threads.

Claggy

EDIT-- and how is it the author in the thread is groovecutter, but in the Number Crunching forum list it's Bernie Vine???

Because i red-x'd the post because it wasn't on topic to the Android thread that was posted in, Mods like everyone else can make new threads, they can also move posts to different threads.

Claggy

Which is what I did, but I have to "start" and new thread so my name gets put there, I then hid my "thread starting post"

Just trying to be helpful!

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EDIT-- and how is it the author in the thread is groovecutter, but in the Number Crunching forum list it's Bernie Vine???

Because i red-x'd the post because it wasn't on topic to the Android thread that was posted in, Mods like everyone else can make new threads, they can also move posts to different threads.

Claggy

Which is what I did, but I have to "start" and new thread so my name gets put there, I then hid my "thread starting post"

Now that makes sense.
I would have thought this forum software would just allow the thread to be moved to another forum.

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Grant
Darwin NT

I would have thought this forum software would just allow the thread to be moved to another forum.

Indeed you can move a "thread" this however was a "post" so needed a new "thread" in NC to move it to.

Yes, confuses me sometimes!!

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Groovecutter's Task 4000164950 details show in part:

          Exit status   196 (0xc4) EXIT_DISK_LIMIT_EXCEEDED
...
  Application version   SETI@home v7 v7.00 
Peak working set size   97.25 MB
       Peak swap size   94.96 MB
      Peak disk usage   33.19 MB

Contrast that with a valid task from another host:

          Exit status   0 (0x0) 
...
  Application version   SETI@home v7 v7.00 
Peak working set size   44.45 MB
       Peak swap size   43.66 MB
      Peak disk usage   0.04 MB

SaH v7 tasks are created with an rsc_disk_limit of 32 MB. That's the limit Groovecutter's system exceeded. SETI@home v7 v7.00 does temporarily use nearly 100 MB of RAM early in a task run while checking for optimum functions, so it's reasonable BOINC may indicate up to that amount of memory. As BOINC seems to be distinguishing possible swap file usage from disk usage, that may not be pertinent. OTOH, if another program demanded enough memory that SaH had to be swapped out and that actual swap usage is included in the disk usage measurement then the splitter code ought to be modified to set rsc_disk_limit to about 100 MB, or BOINC modified to distinguish the different kinds of disk usage.

Other than that, SETI@home v7 v7.00 should use much less than 32 MB of disk. My E4600 core 2 duo system running 32 bit WinXP SP3 is currently doing two such tasks at Seti Beta, disk usage for each is under 50 KB. It's possible for a result file to grow to around 52 KB, the checkpoint file is less than 5K even if there's a "best" signal for each of the 5 types. The stderr.txt can potentially grow large, but Groovecutter's didn't on his errored task I looked at.

                                                                  Joe

groovecutter, I wouldn't worry about non-helpful replies about punctuation, ...

What?? I never read such posts! A few people will have nerve to read = much less help.
The note about punctuation/formatting was quite right

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- ALF - "Find out what you don't do well ..... then don't do it!" :)
 

Brief followup to my previous post. The rsc_disk_limit of 32 MB is plenty, BOINC's measurement of peak disk usage for a task is simply the sum of file sizes in the task's slot directory plus the result file. Killing the task because the usage had grown to 33.19 MB was sensible.

                                                                   Joe

He have another such task:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/result.php?resultid=4000164951

Maximum disk usage exceeded
Peak disk usage 36.61 MB

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- ALF - "Find out what you don't do well ..... then don't do it!" :)