I folks. I have been doing a lot of searching as to why my GPU will do most of the work then suddenly stop and the CPU takes over 100% of the tasks and the amount of work done falls dramatically as would be expected. Can someone please post a link to the appropriate thread to discuss this.

Thanks

Bill S.

This sort ofr question is very difficult to answer without being able to see your computers. There are different answers depending on what GPU you are running, what drivers you are running, and a few other (less common) things.

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

Hi Bob, thanks for the reply. I guess I'll start here.

This is an older machine that I have updated about as far as I can, and can afford to donate to the cause. Here are the pertinent specs that I can think of. GTX 1050 SSC GPU is new, upgraded from a 550Ti for this project. W10 is a fresh install on a new SSD ~three weeks ago. All was working well for about a week then my progress graph sharply dropped off and Seti@Home is using close to100% of the CPU according to Task Mgr. ~24% per core. I unchecked the use CPU box in Seti@Home preferences and updated in Bionc but that just seemed to stop most processes. I don't want to play around too much with settings until I get some assistence.

Microsoft Windows 10 Home (x64) Build 18363.592 (1909/November 2019 Update)
ASUS P7P55D-E LX Mother board
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU 760 @ 2.80GHz
16GB Corsair SDRAM 800.0 MHz (DDR3-1600 / PC3-12800) 4X4
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 SSC (GP107-300) [eVGA.com] PCIe v2.0 x16 (5.0 GT/s) @ x8 (5.0 GT/s) ***NOTE*** PCI-e 3.0 card in PCI-e 2.0 slot on MB
Driver version 441.87
SSD WDC WDS500G2B0A-00SM50 Serial ATA 6Gb/s @ 6Gb/s

Thank you for your time and consideration Bob

Bill S

Letting people see your computers would make things a lot easier (take a look at mine or Robs to see what is visible to others).

At present the are some Seti server issues & work is hard to come by; it could just be a case of the GPU running out of work, then picking up work again. There's a good chance your system is struggling to support the GPU, hence it processes a lot more CPU work when the GPU runs out of work.
But with your system hidden, that's just a wild guess.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Thanks for posting the summary - the first thing I amiss is the GPU drive:

Driver version 441.87

This version is known to give issues with with the SETI@Home applications and nVidia are investigating (they broke the drivers).
Second is Windows 10 has a very bad habit of automatically updating the drivers with their cut-down versions (with the same version numbers), these versions lack the components required for computation (CUDA an OpenCL).

The solution to both is to remove the existing drivers and replace with the last known properly functioning ones from the nVidia website. The version you need to look for is 431.60. There is a tool that is reported to be very good at removing unwanted drivers "DDU" - some reports say this tool will also stop Windows doing unwanted updates of drives.

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

Letting people see your computers would make things a lot easier (take a look at mine or Robs to see what is visible to others).

At present the are some Seti server issues & work is hard to come by; it could just be a case of the GPU running out of work, then picking up work again. There's a good chance your system is struggling to support the GPU, hence it processes a lot more CPU work when the GPU runs out of work.
But with your system hidden, that's just a wild guess.

I initially selected "hidden" due to paranoia. I try to keep things as private as possible these days. Is there any security issues known with allowing the system to be available to view to others ?

I do want to contribute to this cause as much as possible and I appreciate you and Bob's quick replies.

Bill S.

The information we see about an un-hidden computer that is not our own is that held on the database. This comprises the OS, the CPU type, GPU type(s) and similar details. For your own computers you will see a few more details, like the external IP address and the computer name.
To see what is visible, as Grant says, have a look at what you can see about our computers. To do this click on our user name, then the "computers" button.

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

The information we see about an un-hidden computer that is not our own is that held on the database. This comprises the OS, the CPU type, GPU type(s) and similar details. For your own computers you will see a few more details, like the external IP address and the computer name.
To see what is visible, as Grant says, have a look at what you can see about our computers. To do this click on our user name, then the "computers" button.

OK Bob, thanks. I see your info. I'll roll back the nvidia driver and allow the PC to be visible and post back in a few hours when done. While I'm in settings I have the use CPU box checked and set for 100%, 100% of the time just to get some work done. Should I modify anything there ?

Thanks

Bill S.

I would drop the "use at most x% of cpu cores" to 75% which will leave 1 core always available to Windows 10 to work in. Other than that leave everything else alone for a few days to make see how it is working. (Remember tomorrow is Tuesday and so there will be a outage from about 6am PST - and that outage could be anything from three hours up.....)

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

I would drop the "use at most x% of cpu cores" to 75% which will leave 1 core always available to Windows 10 to work in. Other than that leave everything else alone for a few days to make see how it is working. (Remember tomorrow is Tuesday and so there will be a outage from about 6am PST - and that outage could be anything from three hours up.....)

OK, set CPU to 75%. PC is now available to view in forum. I had my network down for awhile today and I noticed the GPU was now running between ~14% up to 100% fluctuating, a lot of work got done today. After getting it back online the GPU is still plugging away on Seti and BOINC tasks. I have not yet rolled back the driver however. Do you still want me to do that or leave well enough alone ?

Bill S.

I have not yet rolled back the driver however. Do you still want me to do that or leave well enough alone ?

Yes, roll back the driver to 431 series to avoid the problem of gpu tasks stalling out and not processing on high angle range or VHAR tasks. The issue is described in this thread.
NVidia 436.xx and later drivers can cause very long compute times especially on Arecibo VHAR work units

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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 not yet rolled back the driver however. Do you still want me to do that or leave well enough alone ?

Yes, roll back the driver to 431 series to avoid the problem of gpu tasks stalling out and not processing on high angle range or VHAR tasks. The issue is described in this thread.
NVidia 436.xx and later drivers can cause very long compute times especially on Arecibo VHAR work units

Thanks, rolled back driver since I could not communicate with the project for a few days. That got all my available work processed in one evening. Now that things are back up I'll get a better test of things.

Thanks everyone for your assistence. I truly appreciate it.

Bill S.

Good decision, we have 11 new Arecibo files loaded for splitting and a good chance some of them might be VHAR tasks. Now you can crunch them safely.

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

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Good decision, we have 11 new Arecibo files loaded for splitting and a good chance some of them might be VHAR tasks. Now you can crunch them safely.

Question#1 When I select "suspend" in either view I want it to stay that way. I find it resumes on it's own. Is there a setting I'm missing ??

Question#2 Is there a thread to follow or some way to be notified when I can update nVidia drivers ? This PC is mostly dedicated to the project but I use it for other graphic intensive programs as well.

Thanks

Bill S.

1 - That happens for some of us. For others suspend suspends until you reset.
2 - Keep an eye on this thread https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=84694

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

Question#1 When I select "suspend" in either view I want it to stay that way. I find it resumes on it's own. Is there a setting I'm missing ??

Depends on where you suspend. If you right click on the BOINC icon and do it there, that's snooze and will only suspend for an hour. That may be set for Simple view as well. If you go to advanced view, then click Activity and then Suspend CPU, does that stay suspended?

Question#1 When I select "suspend" in either view I want it to stay that way. I find it resumes on it's own. Is there a setting I'm missing ??

Depends on where you suspend. If you right click on the BOINC icon and do it there, that's snooze and will only suspend for an hour. That may be set for Simple view as well. If you go to advanced view, then click Activity and then Suspend CPU, does that stay suspended?

Yes, that keeps it suspended, thanks. Haven't tried right clicking on the icon, never would have occured to me. In simple view perhaps the suspend button should be changed to "Pause for one hour" for the sake of newbies ??

Appreciate the reply.

Bill S.

1 - That happens for some of us. For others suspend suspends until you reset.
2 - Keep an eye on this thread https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=84694

Thanks for the link Bob. I'll follow along and see what develops.

Bill S.

I've put it into Github Issues: #3436

I've put it into Github Issues: #3436

Thanks, I've also noticed that when I hit the soon to be "snooze" button there is still some processes running in advanced - task view.

Bill S.