It's looking like things might be clearing up now, 4 boxes have received a partial load.

My crunch-only machines shut down for their weekday siesta before they ran out of work. However, my daily driver has been struggling, too, but occasionally gets a sudden burst of work. About 15 minutes ago, it got 27 tasks, all Arecibo non-VLAR, spread across CPU and GPU. Checking my event log on that machine, I noticed that I haven't gotten any BLC or Arecibo VLAR tasks for the last 11 hours.

I have no clue why the servers are calculating that I am requesting that much work. It should be 2 days worth. I have 92 CPU tasks on board now. Zero GPU tasks.

The Host ID is 8306366

It's not the servers that calculate that - it's your own client doing the requesting. Asking for two days of work for each of 8 CPUs - that would be 16 days. You must have had some left.

I'm pretty sure that isn't how BOINC counts processors. I have ONE CPU in that machine. It gets a quota of 100 tasks at any one time. It has just has ONE CPU with 8 Threads. It should be asking for 172800 seconds of CPU work if the CPU cache is empty based on your formula.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Wow! Talk about chutzpah. Just received the donor request for more funds. Why should I continue to contribute my monies to the project when they can't maintain it properly? I have contributed considerable funds to the project for the past several years. I am having a hard time reconciling my emotions right now with continuing support of the project when they can't send work to my expensive crunchers.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

That's why I suspect there's something odd about the way Keith's Linux client is doing the requesting, which causes the server to fall over with an error. And of course if the server daemon falls over, it has to restart and re-cache whatever it held in memory - that'll slow things down.

Keith's log contained:

690			11/2/2017 13:31:02	[http] [ID#0] Sent header to server: ÿ	
702	SETI@home	11/2/2017 13:31:02	[http] [ID#1] Sent header to server: t (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu 7.8.3)
704	SETI@home	11/2/2017 13:31:02	[http] [ID#1] Sent header to server: Ac

. . Would that be his BOINC client adding those characters?

Stephen

??

Wow! Talk about chutzpah. Just received the donor request for more funds. Why should I continue to contribute my monies to the project when they can't maintain it properly? I have contributed considerable funds to the project for the past several years. I am having a hard time reconciling my emotions right now with continuing support of the project when they can't send work to my expensive crunchers.

. . Maybe that is why they need more donations, to solve the problem with the download servers :)

Stephen

In for the long haul??

Wow! Talk about chutzpah. Just received the donor request for more funds. Why should I continue to contribute my monies to the project when they can't maintain it properly? I have contributed considerable funds to the project for the past several years. I am having a hard time reconciling my emotions right now with continuing support of the project when they can't send work to my expensive crunchers.

. . Maybe that is why they need more donations, to solve the problem with the download servers :)

Stephen

In for the long haul??

No I am seriously thinking about giving that $250 donation so I can get a face-to-face with the project scientists and ask them what would it take to get them properly funded for staff and equipment. I thought that some of the $100M that the Breakthrough Listen initiative received would go towards the SETI project. That didn't happen did it. I wonder if they even would be forthcoming to an individual peon such as myself. Probably would have more success if I started some committee or something that would appear on their radar.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Looks the scientists twisted the right knobs and got work flowing again. Down to the normal 600K level in the RTS buffer. I have only Numbskull that is still getting no work when requested. I might have to resort to the server kick method. The Linux cruncher is back to full caches. Only the Win 10 machine is down to under 100 total tasks. It blows through the CPU tasks pretty quickly being a Ryzen 1700X.

If I didn't have to go to town for groceries this afternoon, it would have been a good time to rip apart the Linux cruncher and start its rebuild to the Ryzen 1800X platform since I wasn't getting any work for it. Project for tomorrow when I can get an earlier start.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

No I am seriously thinking about giving that $250 donation so I can get a face-to-face with the project scientists and ask them what would it take to get them properly funded for staff and equipment.

I remember seriously considering that last year, when the web site downgrade fiasco was in progress. Then I decided that it wouldn't be very nice to get my dander up at a holiday party, because no matter how polite and low-key I might start out, it seemed likely that my frustrations would get the better of me. ;^)

Sheesh! The RTS buffer is up over 800K tasks! And nobody is getting any of them. The splitters have run amok. You would think they have a process that tells the splitters to back off and stop once you reach a prescribed buffer threshold.

Something is definitely hosed when there's 855k rts but no work available, and yet eventually with no intervention the flow will resume..
Makes Eric's fund raiser news blast comment today about how there aren't enough folks crunching to keep up with the available work a bit much ...
When it takes a 10 hour outage each week to do a backup and file maintenance, there's something basic that needs to be addressed.
When it takes several days each week to stagger back into full operation after the outage, there's something basic that needs to be addressed.

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Wow! Talk about chutzpah. Just received the donor request for more funds. Why should I continue to contribute my monies to the project when they can't maintain it properly? I have contributed considerable funds to the project for the past several years. I am having a hard time reconciling my emotions right now with continuing support of the project when they can't send work to my expensive crunchers.

Ditto

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If I didn't have to go to town for groceries this afternoon, it would have been a good time to rip apart the Linux cruncher and start its rebuild to the Ryzen 1800X platform since I wasn't getting any work for it. Project for tomorrow when I can get an earlier start.

I know what you mean. I'd been intending to upgrade my daily driver for a couple weeks, but figured I needed an uninterrupted block of time so I could get it done same day. Finally managed to get that early start on Tuesday. Went from an old Compaq Presario with AMD dual-core and a GT630 to a somewhat newer HP Z620 with a Xeon hex core and GT750Ti. I figure it'll up my SETI contribution on this box by close to 10-fold with, hopefully, minimal increase in electric usage.

Something is definitely hosed when there's 855k rts but no work available, and yet eventually with no intervention the flow will resume..
Makes Eric's fund raiser news blast comment today about how there aren't enough folks crunching to keep up with the available work a bit much ...
When it takes a 10 hour outage each week to do a backup and file maintenance, there's something basic that needs to be addressed.
When it takes several days each week to stagger back into full operation after the outage, there's something basic that needs to be addressed.

Yes, something basic needs to be addressed. Doubt if we peons will ever hear what is troubling the project. I just cannot fathom the lack of communication.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

No I am seriously thinking about giving that $250 donation so I can get a face-to-face with the project scientists and ask them what would it take to get them properly funded for staff and equipment.

I remember seriously considering that last year, when the web site downgrade fiasco was in progress. Then I decided that it wouldn't be very nice to get my dander up at a holiday party, because no matter how polite and low-key I might start out, it seemed likely that my frustrations would get the better of me. ;^)

I think you have my doubts also. I think I would probably blow a gasket or something after the initial pleasantries.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

I know what you mean. I'd been intending to upgrade my daily driver for a couple weeks, but figured I needed an uninterrupted block of time so I could get it done same day. Finally managed to get that early start on Tuesday. Went from an old Compaq Presario with AMD dual-core and a GT630 to a somewhat newer HP Z620 with a Xeon hex core and GT750Ti. I figure it'll up my SETI contribution on this box by close to 10-fold with, hopefully, minimal increase in electric usage.

I just couldn't not jump on the price drop for the motherboard and processor since March. Only the memory was a sore point still. I should net a 100W drop in the system even with double the amount of cores.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

I just cannot fathom the lack of communication.

That's really the root of it all, isn't it? To me, any and all hardware, software and funding issues are far less significant than the near total absence of simple, basic periodic communication with the masses (that'd be us) who are diligently donating our time, hardware, and electricity to the project in the hopes that it may one day succeed.

+1 Totally agree.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

+1 Totally agree.

+ 1000!!!

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+1 Totally agree.

What bothers me is that they're crying for more "customers", when they can't even properly serve (pun intended) the ones they already have... !
...Ghia...

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Humans may rule the world...but bacteria run it...

So I'm new to the forums here, returning to the project after a way too long absence.

My machines ran out of work last night too, and the last two outages they have set idle running out of work (though I think I'm prepared for bunkering now, but manual intervention shouldn't really be necessary given the outages are scheduled and known). If the project really needs our computing resources sounds like there are fairly easy opportunities to improve?

Do none of the official backend SETI guys read the forums, are they aware of our ligament needs and concerns?

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