The tasks on my work list show processing times ranging from 47 minutes to 5 hours.
Most take 2-3 hours. But now there are two tasks with abnormally long run-times.

One of these is 33% done but still shows 11 hours to go. The other is 58% finished but still has 8 hour 30 minutes remaining.

Why are these two v8 8.05 tasks so different from the rest?

Seems strange to me.

Steven Gaber
Oldsmar, FL

Time to crunch a work unit varies depending on the type of work unit. Most work units are in the optimal angle but some can be at a short angle and others at a very long angle. These work units will vary greatly compared to the "normal" angle work units. Other factors that might impact your work is, is the cpu that is processing the work unit or is it the GPU. How old is the equipement, what is the speed set at, etc.... Without knowing more about which work unit you are talking about, it's hard to give a clear cut answer. Also, if it a new machine, estimation of time to complete will be off until 11 validated results are completed.

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Part of the problem is it is a 2 core CPU, and it's also processing work on the video card (AMD).
eg for one particular CPU WU-

Run time 14 hours 28 min 21 sec  
CPU time  4 hours 46 min 13 sec 

Ideally, for 4 hours of CPU time, there should only be 3min (5min max) extra Runtime over the CPU time.

Reserving 1 CPU core to support the video card would help things considerably. Some people prefer to just limit the CPU usage using the Computing Preference settings. I prefer to fully utilise my system and use app_config.xml to reserve a CPU core to support the GPU, but will still revert to CPU processing if you run out of GPU work.

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Grant
Darwin NT

You are running a

AMD A6-6400K APU

The presenting problem is "estimated time left" which is very unreliable until you have a "track record" for that task.

This type of computer design which is called various things but gets down to two things to remember.

1) You probably have one floating point calculating unit per 2 cpus. This slows your CPU tasks significantly.
2) Nobody (Intel or AMD) has been able to make a iGPU (internal GPU which is part of the CPU chip) perform as well as the same GPU in a discretely packaged card.

The advice about dedicating 1 cpu core/thread to the gpu is one of the reliable pieces of advice we have. The other is if you have enough cores/thread available leaving 1 or more uncommitted will speed up the whole system.

If you have an external pci type slot available you would get much better total production with almost any NVIDIA or AMD GPU card. I can recommend used cards like the gtx 750Ti and the gtx 1060 3gb. I have no first hand experience with Amd's video cards so can't offer any supportable opinion about them. I did run an A10-6700 for a while though and a couple of A4/6's.

Tom

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A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association).

Thank you Tom, Grant and Zalster for your responses and explanations.

It turns out that those completion times were transitory. Apparently, the computer was doing something else at the time, updates or virus scan. Or maybe a web browse that was inadvertently left open.

Although this machine primarily crunches S@H, Asteroids and Rosetta, I occasionally use it for other things besides BOINC.

At any rate, those two tasks were completed within normal time limits. The time to completion for them diminished as I watched. But I'd never seen that before on this machine. Some of the earlier computes I used for S@H took days or even a week to complete a task.

Thanks again for your forbearance.

Steve Gaber
Oldsmar, FL