magpie2005 wrote:

Well my second AP WU is ongoing now but I'm not so sure I'll be quite as patient with this one. It started off at 95 hours and after 36 there is still another 197 to go. If it keeps extending time at this rate my machine will have collapsed and died and I'll be six feet under before getting any credit ha-ha. But I'll give it a few days and see how it goes. Glutton for punishment I am...

I'm guessing that your host is a P4 Prescott with hyperthreading(HT)... and that much of the time your first AP WU was crunching, it was the only WU being crunched... Couldn't download new work from the servers for the past 4 days.

These HT CPUs perform much better when there isn't competition from a second WU, almost doubling it's performance... There is still better overall throughput crunching 2 WU at a time, but each WU pays a significant penalty when sharing the CPU... You might consider putting the AP WU in suspended state and then resume if/when the servers run out of work.... Just a thought.

Happy BOINCing,
JDWhale

magpie2005 wrote:

Well I let crunch... and crunch... and it kept on crunching... started off feeding it 111hrs and it ended up crunching its way through 164.6 hrs of CPU time... damned hungry little beggar that one is...

Congratulations... You deserve a pat on the back for persevering, thanks for posting and allowing us to share your experience. I hope you don't mind that I point to your AP WU, wuid=309347223.

The best thing about AP WUs seems to be that extended runtimes might fill in gaps of lean WU splitting and server outages. On the otherside... some might say that the lack of work is being caused by AP WU splitting and distribution.

Comparing CPU times and credit claims of MB and AP WUs on your host, it looks like AP is underclaiming MB stock client by ~40%. As this is supposed to be addressed with the "adjustable" sliding multiplier within 30 days to narrow the gap, it seems that the early adopters are paying a premium to be the "guinea pigs". This is just the opposite of what I would expect; If the project administrators wanted to gain acceptance it seems they would be paying a premium in credits at first and allow the gap to narrow from the other direction. Folks might then be more accomodating to crunching AP during these "early" days; Especially considering the earlier distribution of "ghosts" and guaranteed missed deadlines due to issuing AP work to underqualified hosts.

Just my opinion,
JDWhale

I agree, plus they never finish on my machines. They get to a point and continue to clock time, but the time to finish doesn't change and the percentage done doesn't change. I'm not talking about staring at it for 5 minutes, I mean all day while I'm at work. After that happened on both of my machines, I just started aborting them when I saw them, why waste cpu time on a process that won't finish? But then I ended up with no work because they are such beasts they loaded down my work load quota. For the past two days my machines had nothing to do. So I've switched to Einstein on both of my computers.

The AP units seem to be doing pretty well on my 2.4GHz Q6600. I'm receiving about the same credits per CPU seconds as with MB. But I do have some that may not get any credit for awhile.

Several days ago I received an AP WU on my old 450MHz PII. It started out not looking too bad. The initial estimate to completion was about 500 Hours with a 30 day, 720 hour limit. I let it run for a few days but based upon the actual CPU hours it looked like it was going to take more like 950 hours if it remained linear. I just aborted it to give someone else a try at it. LOL

I imagine that they will get this sorted out eventually.

It seems curious that they don't seem to finish on your machine. Maybe there are some more issues.

Larry

I noticed that Astropulse was downloaded and started automatically at the begining of the week with one work unit that should be taking approx 111hrs.

However, after a few days we have CPU time of 94.5 hrs but still 60 hrs to go!!!! Now I'm no rainman but my math tells me something just don't add up here... 111 - 94.5 should be around... say... oh... let me see now... 16.5... which is way, way different to the 60 hrs still to go.

At this rate not only will I never make the report deadline and therefore not get any credit, I just don't think this will ever end...

Anybody else having this problem or has any idea what is going on and why??????

Welcome to the forums...

A quick answer to your problem is in the Astropulse FAQ:

How long does an Astropulse workunit take to run?
The run times compared to SETI@home enhanced are long (sometimes a week or more), but you should receive the same number of credits per second for astropulse as for seti@home. credits/time should be in line with those using the default enhanced MB application.

The overclocked Q6600s are doing them in 40-80 hours, so your run time is not out of the ordinary. Let it crunch, and see what happens...