Work units appear to be completed, but no credits recorded.

Questions and Answers : Macintosh : Work units appear to be completed, but no credits recorded.
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Michael Watson

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Message 1774071 - Posted: 26 Mar 2016, 3:23:51 UTC

My computer ( Mac Mini, OS X, version 10.5.8) appears to be receiving, processing, an returning SETI @ Home work units as usual. However, over the last three weeks, or so, my credit for completed work units has not advanced at all, and my recently acquired credits have fallen very low.
I'm unsure that my computer is producing valid work, and don't know what's going on with the credit counts. If anyone has any ideas about what might be be wrong, and how to correct it, may I please hear from you? Thank you. Michael
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Profile Jord
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Message 1774162 - Posted: 26 Mar 2016, 16:01:02 UTC - in response to Message 1774071.  

According to your task list you have returned two tasks, one that ran into an error after processing for 140,702 seconds (which is 39 hours), one which ran for 27,781 seconds and has gotten credit.

The rest of your tasks haven't finished yet, or been reported yet.
Remember that BOINC has a two way method of returning the work:
1. after the task finishes BOINC uploads the result file to the server. This is just a normal transferring of data between two hard drives.
2. when the task has been uploaded, it needs to be reported. This is done so that the database knows that you have finished the task, with a certain outcome: valid or invalid.

Since reporting makes use of the server's CPU, memory and hard drive, it uses a lot of overhead. Reporting 35 tasks takes as much overhead as reporting just one task. So that's why BOINC will want to wait with the reporting until perhaps more than one task is waiting to be reported. It will try to coincide this reporting with the requesting of new work.

Last, BOINC will only request more work when the amount of work dips below the low water mark of (Store at least N days of work). If you have a pretty large value here, it can take quite a while before BOINC asks for more work, and reports finished work.

Doing a manual Update on the project reports any tasks still waiting to be reported.

As to why your computer is taking so long to do the work, I don't know. Perhaps that you have your preferences set to only do work when the computer is idle, aka that you're not busy using it. Then it can take a while for BOINC to do work, especially when you're doing quite a bit of other things on that Mac.
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Michael Watson

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Message 1774179 - Posted: 26 Mar 2016, 16:41:03 UTC

Thank you, Ageless, for your help. I don't have my preferences set to prevent SETI@Home work when I'm using the computer. Currently store 5 days of work, with up to an additional 2 days stored. Don't recall the reason for selecting these particular numbers. They may have been default figures. I haven't changed any of the preferences recently, so am a a loss the explain the marked change in performance over the past three weeks or so.
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Profile Jord
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Message 1774187 - Posted: 26 Mar 2016, 16:54:18 UTC - in response to Message 1774179.  

Is it possible that machine overheats? Have you ever looked at the inside, checked it for dust?

A lot of dust in the CPU fan will stop cooling the CPU adequately, after which the CPU will clock itself down to overcome that heat. Or else it'll just power down.
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Message 1790177 - Posted: 25 May 2016, 4:58:31 UTC

Drop the "store additional days" to less less than 1 - this value is not logically names, what it actually does is defers contact to the server to get additional work by the number of days unless you have actually run out of work....
Bob Smith
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Questions and Answers : Macintosh : Work units appear to be completed, but no credits recorded.


 
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