Matt:

Thank you for all the work you and everyone at SETI do. I suggest to those who are frustrated by the upload/download situation (as I have been in the past) is to donate to help get more and better equipment for the project! I have just done that myself, again.

Best,
Wonne

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I've been a member of Seti@home since the first few months of the Classic days. I've seen outages and server problems that make this one pale in comparison. Seti survived, the crunchers survived, all we have to do is be patient.

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You will be assimilated...bunghole!

I don't care much about WHEN I finally get my results transferred back to the server. What is annoying me is the fact that I run out of new work and can't get new tasks. I only let my computer run 24/7 just because of SETI which in the end are additional costs, and it is frustrating to see that the CPU had nothing to do all day when you come home from work, just because servers were down.

I try to solve that problem now by downloading more tasks for at least 2 days working time, so that I hopyfully have enough to work on until the server is accessable.

Greetings from Germany

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I don't care much about WHEN I finally get my results transferred back to the server. What is annoying me is the fact that I run out of new work and can't get new tasks. I only let my computer run 24/7 just because of SETI which in the end are additional costs, and it is frustrating to see that the CPU had nothing to do all day when you come home from work, just because servers were down.

I try to solve that problem now by downloading more tasks for at least 2 days working time, so that I hopyfully have enough to work on until the server is accessable.

Greetings from Germany

There are two things you can do that work for me.

1. Increase your cache to 10 days. I have never run out of Seti work since maxing out my cache.

2. Sign up for other projects as backups. If you mainly want to run Seti, then set Seti's resource share at something like 1000. Then sign up for 2 or 3 other active projects like World Community Grid, Einstein@home, Milkyway@home. Set their resource shares at 1. The end result is you'll always have backup work, but most of your crunching time will still go towards Seti.

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You will be assimilated...bunghole!

Thanks for the information. The reason, why I haven't set up the cache that much is the fact that - if I understood correctly - some tasks show an expiration date of only few days from now. As I wasn't able to steer BOINC Manager to work on the tasks first that expires soon, I was afraid that they will expire before I get to start (and finish) the working units.

But if that is not a problem, I will set the cache up to 10 days which should give me enough work until connection to the servers is possible again.

Thx again.

Andre

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The logjam must be easing slightly I see the results per hour rising and I just received maybe 8-10 hours work for Cuda and 6 hours Mb work so im going to suspend netwoork coms for the last 2 uploads and help take the load off the network

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Thanks for the information. The reason, why I haven't set up the cache that much is the fact that - if I understood correctly - some tasks show an expiration date of only few days from now. As I wasn't able to steer BOINC Manager to work on the tasks first that expires soon, I was afraid that they will expire before I get to start (and finish) the working units.

But if that is not a problem, I will set the cache up to 10 days which should give me enough work until connection to the servers is possible again.

Thx again.

Andre

Actually that's not a problem if you set it up right. There are two settings that affect your cache:

"Computer is connected to the Internet about every"

and

"Maintain enough work for an additional"

If you set "Computer is connected" too high, then yes you will run into the problems you mentioned. What you want to do is set "Computer is connected" to something small, like 0.1, and set "Maintain enough work" for 10. That way you'll still get the short workunits, and the cache will fill up with the longer ones. End result is you have roughly 10 days of work from various projects.

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You will be assimilated...bunghole!

Okay, I did so. Now I've just to wait that I'll get some new tasks from the server... :-)
Then I should always have enough work for 'rainy days'...
Have a nice week-end!

Andre

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Thanks for the information. The reason, why I haven't set up the cache that much is the fact that - if I understood correctly - some tasks show an expiration date of only few days from now. As I wasn't able to steer BOINC Manager to work on the tasks first that expires soon, I was afraid that they will expire before I get to start (and finish) the working units.

But if that is not a problem, I will set the cache up to 10 days which should give me enough work until connection to the servers is possible again.

Thx again.

Andre

Actually, what will end up happening is that BOINC will see that you have tasks close to the deadline and will go into EDF (Earliest Deadline First) mode and not download any more tasks. The more frequent this happens with the workunits in your queue, the less of a 10 day cache you'll actually hold.

It is far better to keep a 2 or 3 day cache (I put mine at 2.75) and I have not run out of work yet, nor do I end up going into EDF mode too often.

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I'm not complaining, but... UPloads to the server have been down for two day, from two different locations! (one dial-up, the other a cable modem...) Perhaps someone needs to give the UPload server a kick?

I've tried flushing the DNS, shutting down/restarting BOINC and re-booting the computers involved...

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Hello, from Albany, CA!...

I know I disappear from time to time too but I must agree with you OzzFan, I KNOW MATT READS FAR MORE than I EVER expected him to have a chance to do. Everyone working the backend for the project and even the volunteers that moderate as well as a few other unsung heroes really make this project work. Without the help given by those so knowledged to others and people constantly making suggestions I do not believe this project would have made it where it is today.. never mind a few small outages here and there or even the longer ones... People are working on it at times even when I am sure there is many other things they could be doing (feeding racoons, enjoying time away from campus, or even spending it with sig others).

I say Keep up the GREAT WORK and Thanks for keeping everyone informed on whats going on there.

Just because I dont post regularly doesnt mean I am not here. I try to catch up every so often when I get the chance. I know my quad not crunching has hurt my RAC but hardware seemed to be a major issue kept killing harddrives. Some things just arent made the way the should. Peace out and happy crunching. Until I return again~~~ RQ

Thanks for the information. The reason, why I haven't set up the cache that much is the fact that - if I understood correctly - some tasks show an expiration date of only few days from now. As I wasn't able to steer BOINC Manager to work on the tasks first that expires soon, I was afraid that they will expire before I get to start (and finish) the working units.

BOINC knows how to manage this. The key is to set "extra days" and not "connect every."

If you try to keep 10 days, and we're on a string of "shorties" you may not have ten days of work (so you won't miss deadlines) and BOINC will rearrange the order to best meet deadlines, but all of that is okay.

Also, there should be not set of settings that causes BOINC to miss deadlines. If you find some, that is something the developers would like to know about.

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I'm not complaining, but... UPloads to the server have been down for two day, from two different locations! (one dial-up, the other a cable modem...) Perhaps someone needs to give the UPload server a kick?

I've tried flushing the DNS, shutting down/restarting BOINC and re-booting the computers involved...

Actually, if the scarecrow graphs are at all accurate, uploads are working.

There are simply more people trying to upload than the servers can handle.

Each time an upload works, that reduces load, and more uploads go through. As time progresses, we should hit a spot (fairly suddenly) where most uploads get through.

It's hard to predict exactly when that will happen, but it will happen.

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[/quote]
Actually, what will end up happening is that BOINC will see that you have tasks close to the deadline and will go into EDF (Earliest Deadline First) mode and not download any more tasks. The more frequent this happens with the workunits in your queue, the less of a 10 day cache you'll actually hold.

It is far better to keep a 2 or 3 day cache (I put mine at 2.75) and I have not run out of work yet, nor do I end up going into EDF mode too often.[/quote]

I think I will play around with the settings a little bit to find the 'perfect' cache time for myself. I have a quad-core machine with 8 GB so even longer workunits will be handled relatively fast. The information about EDF was completely new to my. You both helped me a lot. I must admit that I never looked into this forum before...

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But if that is not a problem, I will set the cache up to 10 days which should give me enough work until connection to the servers is possible again.

Increasing the size of your cache now will only exacerbate the present network problem.
And a 10 day cache is unnecessary IMHO- i've got a 4 day cache & have only run out of work a couple of times since Seti moved to the BOINC platform.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Increasing the size of your cache now will only exacerbate the present network problem.

How, exactly? It just means it'll take you longer to fully catch up.

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You will be assimilated...bunghole!

The information about EDF was completely new to my. You both helped me a lot. I must admit that I never looked into this forum before...

Just keep in mind that EDF isn't a problem. It's a sign that BOINC is reshuffling priorities to meet deadlines, but it's generally pretty successful.

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Increasing the size of your cache now will only exacerbate the present network problem.

How, exactly? It just means it'll take you longer to fully catch up.

If everyone set a 10 day cache it would cause huge problems as the workunit database would suddenly become twice as big, with twice as many work units out in the field. Can you say crash and burn?

If a few people do it it's not a big deal, but I set mine to 3 days as a compromise. The servers dont have to keep track of an extra weeks work sitting in my caches, but I have enough work to get through problem times like the last couple of days.

Ian

Increasing the size of your cache now will only exacerbate the present network problem.

How, exactly? It just means it'll take you longer to fully catch up.

At the time they posted, the network was still fully saturated.
Increasing the size of the cache then would mean it would take even longer for the network traffic to subside & so cause the upload problems to take even longer to resolve.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Thanks for the information. The reason, why I haven't set up the cache that much is the fact that - if I understood correctly - some tasks show an expiration date of only few days from now. As I wasn't able to steer BOINC Manager to work on the tasks first that expires soon, I was afraid that they will expire before I get to start (and finish) the working units.

But if that is not a problem, I will set the cache up to 10 days which should give me enough work until connection to the servers is possible again.

Thx again.

Andre

Actually that's not a problem if you set it up right. There are two settings that affect your cache:

"Computer is connected to the Internet about every"

and

"Maintain enough work for an additional"

If you set "Computer is connected" too high, then yes you will run into the problems you mentioned. What you want to do is set "Computer is connected" to something small, like 0.1, and set "Maintain enough work" for 10. That way you'll still get the short workunits, and the cache will fill up with the longer ones. End result is you have roughly 10 days of work from various projects.

If uploads are not working, then the client will stop asking for new work.

If more than 2 * ncpus tasks are deferred uploading, then the client will stop asking for work to avoid an infinite amount of work on the host. There are some projects that with some computers on some Internet connections that will be capable of download and processing work faster than the upload can occur. This can happen to relatively slow connections if the upload size is larger than the download size, or the upload speed is lower than the download speed, and the computer is relatively fast.

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