After wondering why whenever a work unit was running in the virtual machine, my other computers couldn't connect to other projects or surf, I found the answer in the FAQ's. The VM does not obey the BOINC restrictions on data bandwidth speed, time of use, or total amount. I finally got fed up enough to look at a computer running a VM work unit only to find the VM had about a dozen TCP ports open with data being transferred on all of them. Not nice to bury that deep in FAQ's, it should be a front page item next to the sign up requirements.

I've been trying to tame this beast for a while, limiting how many VM's could start at once, limiting BOINC transfer speeds, etc. But noting is working. As I've got more that one crunch box, it appears as if the total data transfer from all of them if they each had all eight cores going on VM tasks is more than my broadband can supply! Unfortunately, until this beast can be controlled by BOINC I'll have to skip VM projects.

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Which FAQs? Got a link?

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Which FAQs? Got a link?

http://lhcathome.web.cern.ch/Common

Is it possible to configure the maximum amount of data that can be downloaded/uploaded by the project per month?

Tue, 09/13/2011 - 11:48 — Daniel Lombraña...

The BOINC transfer at most network preference is not supported for the moment. If your ISP has a limitation in the bandwidth that you can use each month, bear in mind that the virtual machine will continue downloading/uploading data when needed.

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And now editing the post and taking that out. :)

I'll forward this to Rom.

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From Rom:

Vboxwrapper supports bandwidth quotas and bandwidth throttling.

Turn on <app_msg_receive/> in the client to see what the core client is being told about data usage by vboxwrapper.

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With 7.4.36 Now I'm repeatedly getting

28-Mar-2015 03:11:42 [ATLAS@home] task postponed 86400.000000 sec: VM Hypervisor failed to enter an online state in a timely fashion.

Tasks start and finish in one second with output file missing.

I see there is another "new" version, so I'll give that a try.

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