What the hell is up with BOINC?
Eric
Got a few older towers here that I just use as, basically, fileserving
appliances (threw wireless cards into them and then placed them in a closet,
out of sight and mind). Their only purpose is to just spit out MP3's,
pictures, video, ect. What could be better homes for also crunching SETI?
Granted, they are dated (500 Mhz P3's, 512MB RAM, Win98SE) but SETI Classic
ran great on them. SETI Classic ran just fine on them (for years) not only
after I started using them as just dumb boxes but also when they were my
main working computers.
BOINC? They become a total slugfest. BOINC also, sometimes, locks up
explorer.exe (shell, not browser) causing it to automatically reboot.
Whenever explorer automatically reboots, the network drivers get all fungled
up in memory requiring physical reboots of the PC's.. Very annoying as the
PC's are in a closet, without a monitor/mouse/keyboard.
I keep the OS and all the drivers updated and also scan them often for
spyware/malware. They all stay very clean. There is nothing major running
on them, other than Norton AV/Firewall, UltraVNC (remote desktop, so can get
to their desktop from my "work" computers if need to do some housekeeping
stuff), LCDC (control software for Matrix Orbital LCD's), and of course the
minimum network protocols to get them to talk. None of running software
caused any problem with SETI Classic.
BOINC slows them down a bit initially, but then gets worse and worse until
eventually there is a lockup (anywhere from right away to within a week).
Without BOINC running, things stay great. With BOINC running (or, even if
ran just once and then closed out), a lockup is sure to happen.
Grrr. Hate to stop crunching the SETI stuff, but don't have much choice
since it keeps breaking these PC's. Not about to replace these PC's with
newer ones either since they work beautifully as just dumb file dumpsters --
as long as BOINC doesn't run.
Cheers,
Eric
Louis Holleman
>Not the outages (they don't bother me), but the BOINC software itself?
>
>BOINC? They become a total slugfest. BOINC also, sometimes, locks up
>explorer.exe (shell, not browser) causing it to automatically reboot.
>Whenever explorer automatically reboots, the network drivers get all fungled
>up in memory requiring physical reboots of the PC's.. Very annoying as the
>PC's are in a closet, without a monitor/mouse/keyboard.
>
>BOINC slows them down a bit initially, but then gets worse and worse until
>eventually there is a lockup (anywhere from right away to within a week).
>Without BOINC running, things stay great. With BOINC running (or, even if
>ran just once and then closed out), a lockup is sure to happen.
>
>Grrr. Hate to stop crunching the SETI stuff, but don't have much choice
>since it keeps breaking these PC's. Not about to replace these PC's with
>newer ones either since they work beautifully as just dumb file dumpsters --
>as long as BOINC doesn't run.
Hmmmm.... this sounds familiar. Not on an oldie running an ole OS, but
on my Athlon 2 Ghz with 768 megs running Win2K. OK, that IS old....
The same prob with the explorer. Yes peeps, it's still there.
Now for the other part: this morning I found a message on one of the
other puters:
"giving up on upload of .......: too much elapsed time...."
Since I've been switching to Boinc it's been not too good.
My machines crunch, and they crunch 24/7. One has been online for 7
years now, although it didn't crunch for Seti all that time.
Boinc has seen problems from day 1. OK, sometimes it ran all OK for a
week, but the number of outages is high. Lately, they tried to flush
the whole system, with us crunching as far as we could. Now, my main
machine is able to get new workunits sparsely. It hasn't uploaded one
single result since the stuff came back online, I'm sitting here with
50 results waiting to upload (thats on the main machine alone).
When I look at the server status, I see the units waiting for
validation rise fast again. What's gonna happen? Are they gonna be
rejected because they are overdue? Or will my Boinc software also
decide to give up on upload? Or, better said: I offered my machines to
Seti, paid for the electricity bills, kept the machines running as
good as they can, spent a lot of time maintaining them and now this
awful software decides: OK pal, thanks for your cpu time but it don't
count?
I'm gonna run another few days keeping a sharp eye onto it. If things
screw up, I'm just leaving ship. Period.
Louis
Eric
> At some point old horses no longer can "run" the race and must be
> replaced or retired.....and so it was for Seti Classic as
> well........it had its time and now its time to move on....
> Classics days are numbered ..........soon it too be go
> away
<rest of, no offense, total bullshit snipped>
Lets see here. At the core, SETI Classic and BOINC-SETI are both crunching
basically the same algorithms.
(They are both doing the same math.)
SETI Classic works just fine.
BOINC is a resource hog.
Which one is more efficient here?
"You need new computers" is a completely asinine and ignorant comment.
These computers are just dumb fileservers, and have worked great as such
(even while running SETI Classic). I'll be damned if I'm going to invest in
new computers for fileservers just for SETI. I have new "working" computers
(desktop and laptop), but don't want SETI running on them. The fileservers
are/were the perfect home for SETI. I don't want to have to dick around
troubleshooting them constantly either. I want SETI running transparant in
the background, hidden and forgotten. SETI Classic required no babysitting.
It worked wonderfully. BOINC is bloated and causes them to crash about once
every week. Both are doing the same math, so why is Classic much more
efficient? Where is the extra resources going with BOINC? A prettier
screensaver? Who cares. Hell, the BOINC screensaver doesn't even work
properly with passwords enabled anyway.
My gripe is with the (in)effeciency. I've ran SETI since the beginning,
but if its going to become just a dick sizing contest of specs -- well,
then, fuck 'em.
Apologies for being so blunt...
Cheers,
Eric
Eric
> Hmmmm.... this sounds familiar. Not on an oldie running an ole OS, but
> on my Athlon 2 Ghz with 768 megs running Win2K. OK, that IS old....
I bet SETI Classic screamed on that though. So, why is BOINC so
inefficient?
> The same prob with the explorer. Yes peeps, it's still there.
...and extremely annoying/frusterating!
> I'm gonna run another few days keeping a sharp eye onto it. If things
> screw up, I'm just leaving ship. Period.
I think I'm going to mess with the CLI BOINC stuff for a bit, but if the CLI
proves to be as problematic as the GUI, then I'll be leaving the ship right
behind you. Likewise, I've been running SETI since the start but don't feel
like continuing if it is going to require constant babysitting. Classic
was great, efficient and never caused any problems. I want it running
transparant and hidden in the background, requiring absolutely no hand
holding. So far, BOINC has been everything except such. Basically, its
just been a major PITA.
Cheers,
Eric
Louis Holleman
wrote:
>You NEED to read the main Boinc home page and then the Technical news:
>http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/
>You are expressing concerns over things Berkeley addressed DAYS ago!
>And as for your "50 results", wait until you have 17 machines on line
>and then tell me about pending uploads!
K, followup here: i set 3 oldies to "no new work", let em crunch the
remainder (thats work for about a week for each of them).
The main machine kept on crunching but from this morning 10:35 showed
no new messages. Hitting the "stop getting new work" button didn't
result into it turning to "allow new work", i.o.w. it looked like the
local Boinc Manager running on it screwed up again. So I just exited
Boinc, and fired it back up. Now all of a sudden all 50 units that
were listed as waiting to upload have vanished, the button now shows
"allow new work" and the work tab now shows me 1 unit uploading, 1
unit running, 1 unit preempted, and 47 ready to run. That at least
looks a lot better.
I will empty those caches first and if things proceed reasonably, I'll
get the caches back up again.
Louis
Eric
"Matthias Koch-Schirrmeister wrote in message
> Am Fri, 02 Sep 2005 04:38:47 +0000 schrieb Eric:
>
> > basically, fileserving
> > appliances (threw wireless cards into them and then placed them in a
closet,
> > out of sight and mind). Their only purpose is to just spit out MP3's,
> > pictures, video, ect. What could be better homes for also crunching
SETI?
>
> on them? As long as you don't have the X server running (the graphics
> desktop), even a 500 CPU should do the job. Samba works perfect and rock
> solid as a file server, and the whole set rids you of all virus and most
> malware concerns.
>
> I've been running an AMD 500 w/128MB RAM as file server, mail server and
> domain controller in a network with 80 Windows NT machines and some 200
> users. It was far above any Windows server.
LOL, actually that very idea has been in the back of my head for some time
now.
I've been wanting to, eventually, do just that but want all the data/files
on ext2(3)fs and not fat32 (currently) afterwards.
Problem is that all three of them are so full that there is no room to
juggle. Need two empty cups to juggle three cups of water. I'm not
trusting of any attempts of non-destructive conversion either. :^)
Been looking at and pricing some standalone NAS stuff lately though.
Afterwards, switching the dumb boxes to Linux will be cake.
Cheers!
-Eric
Eric
>
> You must not remember the early days of Classic! It was at least as
> bad as Boinc has EVER been!
> Classic's problems are MANY and have been mentioned MANY times before
> but basically it is a program that has outlived its usefulness and is
> being replaced. There are over 50 MILLION results from Classic that
> STILL need verifying to see if they actually found anything! The
> program cannot track who downloads and who uploads a workunit, making
> cheating a DISTINCT possibility. Cheaters HAVE been caught but it is a
> laborious process hand checking the data unit by unit. Part of the
> problem was the old one crunched unit means one credit. This
> encouraged people that were just in it for the credits to find ways
> around properly crunching and returning units. There are MANY other
> things like Berkeley can't supply enough units for all of users until
> they bring some more projects on-line so they keep sending out the old
> units over and over and over just to keep us happy. Part of that
> solution was solved when other Scientists asked if there was a way
> they could jump on the bandwagon of Distributed Computing. Berkeley
> was having "issues" with Classic and decided to design and write a
> whole new program that would be the foundation for at least part of
> their problems AND allow us users to setup our computers to crunch for
> other projects that we liked. These other projects allowed Berkeley to
> be able to start the process of switching from classic to Boinc. We
> users would have multiple projects to choose from and would NEVER run
> out of work!
> Is Boinc having growing pains? ABSOLUTELY!!! Will it get better? Again
> ABSOLUTELY!!! Will it be today? NO! Will it be sooner rather than
> later? HOPEFULLY!! If you can't live with these new ways of doing
> things then by all means take your computers and do something else
> with them, we WILL miss your help! BUT some will carry on and we WILL
> make the program BETTER than Classic ever thought of being, and maybe
> then you will come back. You are more than welcome to stay and help us
> in our journey, but you are also welcome to stand aside and watch.
Hi,
Your well-spirited reply is much appreciated. :^)
I apologize to anyone offended by one of my previous postings in this thead
that was, well, very blunt. It was a knee-jerk reaction to what I
considered a knee-jerk reply. Such a reaction is normally out of my
character.
Anyway. I'm with you on everything. Seems like much of those issues
could've been addressed on the server (Berkeley) side though without a
totally new client. I don't get why anyone would "cheat" either. Whats the
point? Its not like you get a dessert or anything. Oh well. :^)
I'm going to play with CLI (Win) and see how that goes. Eventually, hoping
to switch these dumb boxes to Linux as well. I'm assuming Boinc for Linux
is probably very streamlined...
Cheers!
Eric
Louis Holleman
>Your well-spirited reply is much appreciated. :^)
>
>I apologize to anyone offended by one of my previous postings in this thead
>that was, well, very blunt. It was a knee-jerk reaction to what I
>considered a knee-jerk reply. Such a reaction is normally out of my
>character.
I just don't. Boinc software is a piece of shit, at least here.
Tonight again I cud simply reboot the machine again, coz the whole
system froze up once more. That's not what I'm used to and it
definately isn't what I want. And yes, I'm talking about Boinc 4.45,
I've been running 4.13 for several months without big probs. Remember,
I gotta run Boinc 4.45 in order to run Seti. I will at max. try it out
for another month, if things haven't improved by then, I still leave
this ship. Seti now needs Boinc and if I got the picture right, Boinc
is messing up big, here at least. Tell me what U want, Seti might have
its own probs. OK. I cud handle the 2001 big outage. But this is diff
stuff.
Louis
Louis Holleman
wrote:
>First you DO NOT have to run 4.45 to run Boinc. I run 4.19 on one
>machine just fine! Thereason they made people upgrade from versions
>earlier than 4.19 is because they would not act right after an outage.
>I run Boinc on 17 different computers. From Windows Me to 2000 to XP
>both Home and Pro! Boinc is NOT the problem!!!!
>If you cannot make Boinc run right on your computer just go back to
>Classic, you did crunch it right? Use your old account info, no new
>accounts are allowed, and you can crunch just fine until they shut it
>down.
George, I read ya. But when I upgraded, I got a pointer set at Boinc
4.45 and I expect it to run decently. Not to try it first and
downgrade again because of....
I stick with my statement: I want to run Seti. It shud be running
through Boinc. If Boinc messes up, it's simply the end of things.
The days I was willing to keep on going trying everything to keep my
puters going have long gone. They're here for me to do things the way
I wanna. I have learnt to take Bill Gates bullshit for granted. If
Berkeley goes the same way ( U buy my shit, or buy a better puter) I'm
out.
Louis
Martin 53N 1W
[...]
> I'm going to play with CLI (Win) and see how that goes. Eventually, hoping
> to switch these dumb boxes to Linux as well. I'm assuming Boinc for Linux
> is probably very streamlined...
Yep, it all works very well on Linux.
Not sure what you mean by 'streamlined' exactly. There are optimised
clients (Boinc & s@h) that give a x2 speedup (for Windows also) and you
get many choices as to how to run it all. With the new OS scheduler in
the Linux 2.6 kernels, the system always stays very responsive for the user.
Have fun,
Martin
--
---------- OS? What's that?! (Martin_285 on Mandriva)
- Martin - To most people, "Operating System" is unknown & strange.
- 53N 1W - Mandriva 10LE GNU Linux - An OS for Supercomputers & PCs
---------- http://www1.mandrivalinux.com/en/concept.php3
Josef W. Segur
>On Fri, 02 Sep 2005 17:32:14 GMT, "Eric" <nos...@no.nospam.not> wrote:
>
>>I'm going to play with CLI (Win) and see how that goes. Eventually, hoping
>>to switch these dumb boxes to Linux as well. I'm assuming Boinc for Linux
>>is probably very streamlined...
>>
>The CLI for Boinc is not faster than the regular boincmgr.exe program,
>in fact the manager runs the CLI. Just one of the things they fixed.
When BoincMgr.exe 4.45 is running (even minimized to the tray), it does
use some CPU cycles: about 3% on my 200 MHz Win95 system, or ~6 million
CPU cycles per second. That may be a negligible amount on faster systems,
but it is slightly more efficient to run the Boinc core client as a
service or in a console.
With Boinc running that way, BoincMgr.exe can be run when needed, then a
File | exit will kill it but the core client continues running.
--
Joe
Eric
> I've neveer had any problems but realize it is tricky. You should think
> about purchasing a dvd recorder or a large streamer as a backup device. To
> maintain data saftey, you'll need that anyway.
>
>
> Greetings
> Matthias
Got plenty of internal and external DVD-RW's, but so much data (I do a lot
of video stuff) that even DVD's would be cumbersome.
Been reading reviews and pricing various network storage devices lately.
Preference is something at least one terabyte. What I would actually like
to do is to consolidate all the hard drives (all are SCSI U2W, a little
dated now, but still fine) in the "fileservers" into just one tower -- which
has RAID capability with it's onboard SCSI. All the HDD's are RAID-ready.
I'd like to get the RAID thing going on (lost about 150GB a few weeks ago)
for the "working" data space and then have a very large NAS "dumpster" to
store things more permenetly.
Cheers!
Eric