Running a 166MHZ with 32MB of RAM as a file server/BOINC (strictly SETI) and for the last week, I've been getting the following:

"SETI@home - (date) (Time) - Message from server: No work available (there was work but your computer doesn't have enough memory)"

Could we chew up a few smaller work units for the 'old folks' to work on? :o)

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Stewie: So, is there any tread left on the tires? Or at this point would it be like throwing a hot dog down a hallway?

Fox Sunday (US) at 9PM ET/PT

> Running a 166MHZ with 32MB of RAM as a file server/BOINC (strictly SETI) and
> for the last week, I've been getting the following:
>
> "SETI@home - (date) (Time) - Message from server: No work available (there was
> work but your computer doesn't have enough memory)"
>
> Could we chew up a few smaller work units for the 'old folks' to work on? :o)
>

Just about every WU that is out there need atleast 64 meg of ram or more add another stick and you will get work.

Scott

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" "

Have you run low on hard disk space? I have an old machine with very little HD space and got this error when i setup BOINC.

I had to change my prefereces to leave at lease .001GB. This means BOINC will continue to crunch even if HD space is very low.

Of course if that is the case you could just try tidy up the machine!

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Actually, I misspoke...it does have 64MB of RAM and about 5 GB of HD space left on it. I may just back the data on it to tape and reformat. The 8 GB drive in it has been acting funny lately and it may be time for a fresh install... :o)

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Stewie: So, is there any tread left on the tires? Or at this point would it be like throwing a hot dog down a hallway?

Fox Sunday (US) at 9PM ET/PT

> Just about every WU that is out there need atleast 64 meg of ram or more add
> another stick and you will get work.
>
> Scott

Not according to my task manager.

One of the columns you can display is "Peak Memory Usage", which would be the highest RAM ever required for the running application.

boinc.exe peak=6128K
setiathome_4.08_windows_intelx86.exe peak=17040k

Thats 23Meg in my book ;)

Yeah, it was either the Solaris or the Mac platform with graphics that cause BOINC to terminate the application with memory threshold exceeded.

So we had to increase the minimum to 64MB.

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----- Rom
BOINC Development Team, U.C. Berkeley
My Blog

> Yeah, it was either the Solaris or the Mac platform with graphics that cause
> BOINC to terminate the application with memory threshold exceeded.
>
> So we had to increase the minimum to 64MB.
>
>

But a little bit of the memory is always used by the bios, so why not choose 63 MB instead?

> Actually, I misspoke...it does have 64MB of RAM and about 5 GB of HD space
> left on it. I may just back the data on it to tape and reformat. The 8 GB
> drive in it has been acting funny lately and it may be time for a fresh
> install... :o)


Is 64M enough? The older WU's said 32M, but really they were set to 10 bytes less than 32M: 32M is 33,554,432, the older WU's specified 33,554,422 was needed, which worked even when you just had 32M RAM.

Currently the WUs require 64M - 67,108,864 bytes RAM, which really means the machine has to have like 80 or 96M.


The scheduler checks that the host enough RAM, so a 64M machine isn't big enough. From the sched_send.c source:

if (wu.rsc_memory_bound > m_nbytes) {
log_messages.printf(
SCHED_MSG_LOG::DEBUG, "[WU#%d %s] needs %f mem; [HOST#%d] has %fn",
wu.id, wu.name, wu.rsc_memory_bound, host.id, m_nbytes
);

[EDITED]
Which might look OK but isn't right. My 64M machine actually shows one byte less than 64M so the test doesn't work right, its the address of the last byte. RAM goes from 0x0000000 to 0x3ffffff.
[/EDIT]


So was the 10 byte difference between 32M and the old WU requirement a mistake or is the new WU requirment that the machine have more than 64M a mistake?

> Yeah, it was either the Solaris or the Mac platform with graphics that cause
> BOINC to terminate the application with memory threshold exceeded.
>
> So we had to increase the minimum to 64MB.
>
>

I don't know about the mac client, but I guess you can be run it without graphics, too.

So why don't you just disable graphics if memory is too low?

Regards Hans

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Well, the point is moot at the motherboard just took a permanent nap and the HD spindle motor was also starting to hum.

It had a good run, since I built it in mid-1996 and the drive in question was from 1999. I'll pop the drive in another machine (to retrieve the backup data) and look for another machine to deploy...

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Stewie: So, is there any tread left on the tires? Or at this point would it be like throwing a hot dog down a hallway?

Fox Sunday (US) at 9PM ET/PT