Why does it take so long to get new tasks?

I have wasted more than 20 minutes waiting. Still no tasks so I moved to another project.

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South Walker
MEGA 1999

That's because we're recovering from our weekly server maintenance and it takes time to recover from that usually, but ATM there's a contest going on so it may take a little longer today.

Cheers.

From what I can tell in the multitude of complaints about this in the forum over the years, it's because the task allocation metrics are outdated, and do not properly account for the speed at which tasks are completed with modern-day hardware.

In my opinion, it's a shame that the SETI@Home leadership doesn't put a higher priority on the strategic management and optimization of number crunching for their volunteers. A tremendous amount of improvement can be realized regarding this, and not just concerning the weekly maintenance delay that caused your frustration today.

That’s part of the problem at large.

But if he just signed up today on our weekly maintenance day, then it’s just bad timing.

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Seti@Home classic workunits: 29,492 CPU time: 134,419 hours

If I understand things correctly, a new machine is being tested out in beta at the moment that should help the situation. The seti people are working on the problem and a solution is nigh. At least I hope it gives us a quicker recovery period.

Doubt it does anything for shortening the recovery period. The upload server is the new host being tested. Not a download server.

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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 guess it depends on what other processes it puts on the upload server.

I think we would all be happy if it could accept uploads faster as sometimes the uploading process slows down and then you can't get new WUs because it hasn't kept up and acknowledged your uploads.

If it can process the uploads and deletes or free up the machine that does those functions so that happens faster then that would help too as it seems the backlog of deletes slows down the splitters.

Just trying to look on the bright side of seti :-)

I guess it depends on what other processes it puts on the upload server.

I think we would all be happy if it could accept uploads faster as sometimes the uploading process slows down and then you can't get new WUs because it hasn't kept up and acknowledged your uploads.

If it can process the uploads and deletes or free up the machine that does those functions so that happens faster then that would help too as it seems the backlog of deletes slows down the splitters.

Just trying to look on the bright side of seti :-)

It might. Depends on whether they keep the same processes they are running on the old upload server Bruno on the same replacement server. Bruno also hosts the file deleters and that is one of the processes that has a direct correlation with the speed of the splitting process.

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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 have run SETI off and on for years. Mostly because of the download/upload situation.
I have a pair of GTX 970 cards and have my Boinc/Options/Computing preferences set to download 0 tasks stored and 0 additional tasks because I run different projects at the same time.
Some projects can't handle the situation where I suspend running wus, sign off as one user and sign on as another. This should not cause the running wus to fail but for some projects it does.
Personally I think BOINC should allow users to do something other than get a couple of units or get a whole bunch. If I set stored units to .1 I can get 20 to 40 work units depending on the project.
No complaints today. As soon as I made SETI active it promptly downloaded 2 units.
Just noticed that I had 2 units ready to report and only 1 running.
Oh well, whatever.

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South Walker
MEGA 1999

You shouldn't have to log off of BOINC and sign in as another user. A single sign in should work across all BOINC projects.

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

I have 3 user accounts due to work, personal and hobbies. While I could possibly consolidate 2, the work user must remain separate.

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South Walker
MEGA 1999

If you mean three different user id numbers then the answer is "NO".
One thing to be aware of is that one can have as many computers on a single account as one wants.

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

If you mean three different user id numbers then the answer is "NO".
One thing to be aware of is that one can have as many computers on a single account as one wants.

And you can have different settings for them by making use of the Home, Work or School web based preferences, as well as preferences set on the systems themselves.

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Grant
Darwin NT

There is a misunderstanding.

I am writing about 3 users accounts on a Windows 7 machine.

One machine with 3 users. All of which are me, one person.

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South Walker
MEGA 1999

And I have only 1 BOINC user number

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South Walker
MEGA 1999

By using fast user switching in Windows, you confuse BOINC. It will only be able to use the drivers for the videocard for the original user that started BOINC. When using fast user switch, you use the built-in Windows drivers that lack things as CUDA and OpenCL. Thus BOINC will either stop processing (with well behaved science applications) or err the work being done (with less well-behaved science applications), because all of a sudden the GPU driver it was using is no longer available.

The only fix for this is not to use fast user switch, but log off and back on, and allow for all accounts to run BOINC (Manager).

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>"The only fix for this is not to use fast user switch, but log off and back on, and allow for all accounts to run BOINC (Manager)."

That is exactly correct and is what I do.

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South Walker
MEGA 1999

That means you only have one SETI account, not three!
If you go to your account page inSETI (https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/home.php) in each of your "accounts" do you get the same number against "UserID" - if you do you have only one account, and all the credits you are accumulating are there. If not, you have two or more accounts, and there is no way of joining the accounts into one account.

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

I never said I had 3 SETI accounts.

I have 3 Windows 7 "users" all with the same Boinc identifier and ONLY 1 account for each project I run.

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South Walker
MEGA 1999

That should be fine.

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Mike Bader
BOINC V7.16.5
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/team_join_form.php?id=5 - Join Our International Team
[img]http://boinc.mundayweb.com/one/stats.php?