Dropping Seti @ Home & possibly Boinc

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Stupid boinc is killing my pc's, since the new seti at home update proliferated my network, its killing the pc's left right and centre.

My technician came back after telling me a whole room wouldnt login to the AD server, after he disabled the boinc service it worked fine. (not the first time in the last 2 weeks either)

As a temp measure i've told boinc to run from 5pm - 9am only. Untill I either remove it from the pc's or think about another solution.

What annoys me is, how seti can just force you to have new software downloaded / enhanced wu's etc.

That is what has caused me all the problems. So expect me to drop out of contention, and possibly even think about moving away from boinc.

Pretty embarassing when you have ppl stating it's "Your Boinc software thats causing problems"

I never had this with the original Seti at home.

I'm annoyed. :mad:
 
Well im thinking of dropping seti and DC in general, since enhanced came out my machines seem to be running a lot slower, not sure if its the extra mem required or what but getting fed up waiting for a Duel Xeon to respond, if i turn it off its fine! that with the complete hash of a points system might just be the end for it :(
Shame for the loss of computing power 2x Xeon @ 3.1, P4 @4.0, 2x P4 @ 2.8, P4 @2.0, A64 @ 3200 & Barton 2500, nothing compared to you bulldog66 but was helping the effort no less.
 
Yup, we all know that Folding would have even more of a detrimental effect than SETI on the responsiveness of a machine, due to the stupid amounts of RAM that the bigger WUs take up.

Bully, first thing to do is to try and isolate the problem. I'm not sure why BOINC would have caused issues with AD, but I'll ask around.

h2ocooler, it's probably the memory usage. That certainly is what bogs down my machines. If you still want to run DC, find a project that uses a lot less memory. Einstein, SIMAP and Leiden Classical are all nice and gentle on the memory usage; they're just off the top of my head.
 
At that point you end up struggling to score competitively because the big WUs are worth a lot more. So it's not worth your time running it, if you're interested in the stats that is. The same if you run AMD processors and not Intels, and that's because of licencing issues?!

I don't hate Folding, but they did break one of the main rules about distributed computing. That being to use the idle resources of a computer. Very few computers have 400 MB of RAM unused.
 
If you've got a farm then you can get away with crunching samll woos and still get lots of credit.

TBH i think folding is the way to go for farms, seti enhanced just takes too much from the system, plus the credit you get from these enhanced woo is completly rubbish. My RAC for seti has halved since i moved over to enhanced even tho borkeley say the credit you get will work out the same.

I think i might get my million on seti and then move over to folding completly
 
If you've got a farm you can crunch whatever size WU's you want it's not like your gonna be using the farm for anything else ;)

And I'm way ahead of ya ;) I moved from Seti to Fah about a month ago, DC life has certainly been much simpler since.

So far I haven't had a single error on any of my machines they simply download, calculate and upload and I just monitor all the machines in FahMon over the network.
 
Boinc does not begin and end with Seti!

Browse the list at boincstats and pick one you like the sound of.

Einstein is probably a good choice for farms as there is always work. Rosetta doesn't use the canonical result to grant credit, you get it as soon as the WU uploads and CPDN delivers a set value of credit per trickle, so faster machines earn more credit.
 
It does relate to seti, the enchanced client is seti specific and thats what bully is having trouble with.

I've not noticed any problems with my home farm relating to AD and crunch3rs enhanced seti client, if anything its more stable than the optimized calibrating clients I was running before.

Its got to be the memory issues, especially if you are running Hyperthreaded or dual core, or heaven forbid HT Dual core machines (4 x 60MB for enhanced!). Its going to affect performance for sure.

The only other thing I can think of is that the switch to enhanced has caused short term bandwidth problems on your network Bully, with the clients all downloading an *ordure* load of WU's to fill their caches up.

No easy answers I know, I know its easy to get upset, I've been where you are now with huge farms, just cut back, perhaps switch problematic machines over to Predictor or something till the dust settles and everything gets back to normality. These hiccups always happen every now and then with Seti as you well know from past performances :)
 
Hope you can find a solution soon Bully - Seti enhanced seems to be doing more harm than good at the moment :o



Lets not turn this into a pimping thread, or even worse a **** eachother's project choices off thread - the best thing for me about the DC forum is the lack of flaming and a real community spirit no matter what your project choice :)
 
I've not had any trouble with enhanced, but then I've only been running it a few days. There's no doubt it's more demanding than the previous client.

If SETI@home is no longer for you, then as others have said, please find something else. We're thin enough on the ground already without losing major farms. :(
 
Whitestar said:
TBH i think folding is the way to go for farms, seti enhanced just takes too much from the system, plus the credit you get from these enhanced woo is completly rubbish. My RAC for seti has halved since i moved over to enhanced even tho borkeley say the credit you get will work out the same.

I think i might get my million on seti and then move over to folding completly

Were you using optimised SETI science apps though? If so, that's why your RAC is down. Enhanced should give about the same credit as the old SETI, but only with standard clients. An optimised science app meant that you were getting through work quicker than standard and that boosted your RAC. If/when there are optimised Enhanced apps, then your RAC will level out again.

Each to their own. I'm not going to be folding again. I don't even like SETI either, but there's another 20 or so BOINC projects that I find more interesting or more scientifically sound. What I do like is that BOINC is very easily remotely configured and I can run lots of different projects without installing more clients.
 
My Xeon is HT so yes 4 at a time and loads of mem used (but it does have 2Gb of RAM), when using Quickpar to restore an archive if i leave Seti running a typical archive takes 35mins @ 35Mb/s to repair, if i suspend it done in 2.5 mins @ 600Mb/s ! seems to be the hard disk access that slows it down.

Looking in my Queue i have only 2 WU's that will take less that 9 hours to do, most are OVER 13 hours for 30 points, i know its not all about the points but it does add to the fun of it competing amongst the team (was @ 5th in the team for RAC )

When i started using the optimised clients it took about 30 mins of a WU on the Xeon, from 2.00h > 1.30h, but even working it at 2 hours per unit @ 20 points x4 cpu's x18 hour's up time a day = 720 RAC
Now at 8 hours per unit @ 30 points x4 cpu's x 18 hour's = 240 RAC at best so how the hell can BORKLEY say that the point will be equal to seti 4.18 the maths just wont work.
 
:rolleyes:


I've adjusted the time that my pc's will access and work boinc, i'm now going to confirm that they have infact connected / and taken their new instructions.

If I find this is not the case I will then put seti down to 1%, put predictor to 98%.

Typical I had to remove climate down to 1% as it was hogging several gigabytes of HD on each machine, and making sum run out of space, and causing problems.


Now the enhanced wu's are killing my pc's by using all the ram / cpu, even when it should throttle down and allow normal access.

I need a non invasive boinc project that is neither HD hungry or greedy with resource allocation.

Any ideas..

If I do the swop it will be summer, so I may have to disable / uninstall it all untill I can go round putting it back on, (if I can verify it won't have any detrimental effect)
 
Not tried the enhanced one but I remember (back in the good ol days) that I couldn't run boinc on one of my servers as it conflicted somehow with backup exec so bad that it'd often reboot! Sounds weird but after I removed boinc, it never crashed again.

Cant run boinc or anything at all at work these days tho. Group wide auditing software you see :(
 
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