Android BOINC 7.18.0, thus far...

[Jord van der Elst]

Hi all,

I've been testing 7.18.0 (from https://boinc.berkeley.edu/download_all.php) the past few days and I must say, my compliments.

It did crash the first time I started it.

It has crashed since that time at times when I unplugged the phone and did other things with it.

But in all honesty, I added the two problem projects from last time, Asteroids and Einstein and haven't had (m)any problems with them. Well, Asteroids doesn't have work, probably still their database problem from earlier. But Einstein, which would cause the app to crash by just looking at it, did finish its 4 tasks within 2 days. Thumbs up.

Adding Einstein now also worked without a hitch, I didn't have to change anything about the way my name was shown. I could add Asteroids and Einstein at the same time.

I have seen some minor problems with the icon in the task bar. It will disappear at times. Or not come up while BOINC is running. I did change my app notifications for BOINC to not chime upon all the messages. I set both BOINC and Notices to allow notifications and display in the status bar, but not show banners or give a sound. Turning everything off also stops the icon from showing here.

When the icon shows it doesn't always change back to paused or running upon the situation. I've had that it would show suspended - and the notification as well - for half an hour while the app was already running and doing science. Only by looking at the notification did the icon and notification change to Running.

But that's minor. The bigger one is still that the app can crash during the day when I don't have the phone on a charger, also when I do have it on the charger, and when I start another app that may be heavy on the CPU while it's starting (like Rocket Player). BOINC will just silently disappear and when I then plug in my phone when it's unplugged, it will also not auto start.

Each night when I plug in my phone I have to check that BOINC has started.

I also noticed that we're now generating more heat. When I leave the protective plastic cover on the phone while charging and running BOINC, the glass gets very hot. I do have to take the cover off. But a caveat here is that this only happens when I have my phone on its own quick-charger in the wall. It doesn't happen when I use a normal USB port or my powerbank.

But some of these things may be attributed to the weirdness of my Huawei P20 Lite. Later this week I'll get my new Asus Zenfone 8 in and I'll use BOINC to burn it in then, see how it works on that device. :)

So, all in all, not many complaints.

I do know that calculations can be suspended when I use my phone for other things. I also understand that even BOINC can crash in these situations. Not to worry.

So far though, thumbs up.

Cheers,

-- Jord

[Peter Jasion]

Hello all!

I too have been testing 7.18.0 on my Galaxy S10 Model SM-G973U running Android 11.0 with all updates installed as of May 2021.

Since my installation I have had basically no issues whatsoever. The only thing that occurred once was it falsely sensed a 0% battery charge and suspended computation when the battery was actually 66% and I had set the threshold at 50%.

I haven't used the Android version for some years because I could never get World Community Grid running. This time it came right up!

I will complete the testing parameters and submit them on the alpha site in the next day or two.

Regards,

Peter S Jasion

"The only thing constant is change..."

Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android

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[Jord van der Elst]

All right,

I ran 7.18.0 on my new Asus Zenfone 8 today and found:

- that this zaps my battery really quickly, so much so that when I have the phone on a normal USB charging port (or powerbank), the battery still empties instead of charges while BOINC is running, even with just 2 cores.

- when I do anything with my phone, BOINC only shows in the status bar. When you then click the icon, open the app and check the event log, it'll always show that the app just started. This is probably an Android (11) thing. I don't worry about it.

But:

- on both this phone and on my Huawei P20 lite it sometimes happens that I start BOINC and that I just get the BOINC logo, for minutes. After that the app either crashes, or it starts. I've been in this logo screen and pressed square, then removed the BOINC app but that doesn't get rid of this logo screen.

- on both phones the app will crash without warning and not auto start at plugging the charger in.

- the notification on the icon runs behind. It happens quite often that I see BOINC showing as suspended on this notification while it's running. On both phones.

I'll run it through the night on the Zenfone on the 30W charger, that's the only charger that can charge the phone while BOINC is running.

Cheers,

-- Jord

[Peter Jasion]

Jord,

Well I'm having just the opposite experience that you are. Again running on my Samsung Galaxy S10 the only issue I've found so far is that now more then twice it's sensed a 0% battery capacity and suspended computation when it's been above the 50% threshold that I've set. This can't be happening that much because every time I use my phone I'm hearing the alert that it has suspended computation and I get the close your phone banner alert to restart computation.

Battery drainage: I am so impressed with this version it's not funny. I'm running full 4 cores on both World Community Grid and Rosetta. I just close all my apps except for BOINC with about 82% of battery before I retire for the evening and wake up 8 hours later and the battery is still at 52%.

By the way I'm not having any problems with the GUI content of the client whatsoever. I'm seeing all task activity with no issues every time I open the app.

Regards,

Peter 

"The only thing constant is change..."

Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android

On Fri, Jul 2, 2021 at 8:20 PM, Jord van der Elst

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[Peter Jasion]

Jord

FYI, 30% drop in battery over 8 hours with preferences of RAM and CPU time set at 75%...

Peter

"The only thing constant is change..."

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[Jord van der Elst]

I know why the power drain is so high. Normally on the big.LITTLE SoCs the little CPU cores do the heavy lifting, because the big cores are so power hungry. Blazing fast, but only used for Android specific duties.

Not so on my phone.

"The Snapdragon 888 has eight-core tri-cluster with one Kryo 680 Prime @ 2.84GHz based on the ARM's top Cortex-X1 design, a trio of Kryo 680 Gold @ 2.42GHz based on regular Cortex-A78, and, finally, we have four Kryo 680 Silver @ 1.8GHz based on Cortex-A55 for more mundane tasks."

When I check on CPU-Z when BOINC runs, I see the first four cores at idle (300MHz), three cores at 2,424MHz and the last core at 2,830MHz.

That means BOINC is using my fast big cores. Hence the power drain. I haven't tried running 8 cores, to see what that does. Maybe in the future. For the moment BOINC has been uninstalled from this phone. 

I am confident enough in this version though that I will update my farm to it. 

😁

Jord

[Yavanius Gekkō Misuto]

Sofar, it seems BOINC stabilized after the somewhat disastrous last release. It seems BOINC isn't disappearing. I haven't had time to properly track, but it's seemingly not disappearing like last version.

Are you noticing any performance issues? It seems that some WCG MCM are taking longer but then I'll see some that are noticeably shorter. I'm not sure if this is BOINC, changes to WUs, or a combo.

I only updated a few of the droids as I wanted to see how it played out first, but I think I might go ahead and update them all.

Yav