Client Downloads to many Wu's

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STE\/E

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Message 12045 - Posted: 13 Aug 2007, 11:50:42 UTC
Last modified: 13 Aug 2007, 11:54:30 UTC

Why does the BOINC Client download 12 hours of work or more to a Project that only has a 0.03% Resource Share ???

I usually only have 1 Project running on my PC's & set the Resource Share to a high # like 30000 or even higher, the rest of the Projects Attached to the PC's I set to a 1 Resource Share. But if I allow work to 1 of the Projects with a 1 Resource Share it will invariably Download whatever I have my Connect Time set to which I usually set to 1 Day even though the Project I have set to 30000 has a full Cache of work to do.

So even though I only want this Project to run 0.03% of the Time I have a whole 24 hours of work to do from it. I started noticing this only with the v5.10 Series of Clients. Maybe the v5.8 Series did this too, I don't remember. But I do know the v5.4.11 Client never did this. It would only Download 1 Wu, and until that Wu ran and finished it wouldn't Download any more work from the Project set to a 1 Resource Share unless I ran out of work from the project set to a 30000 Resource Share. And if I did run out of work from the project set to a 30000 Resource Share the Project with a 1 Resoure Share would only Download enough Wu's to keep how ever many Cores the CPU had to keep it running & as those finished it would download 1 more.

The way the v5.10 Series of Clients work it makes it almost impossible to set up a backup Project unless you want a boatload of Wu's from it. I'm running the v5.10.13 & v5.10.18 Clients and both of them show the same tendency to Download way to much work for what the Projects Resource Share is set to.

I know I can set my Connect time lower but then that hinders me from keeping a reasonable 1 day supply of Wu's from the Project I want to mainly run.
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Rob Lilley

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Message 12051 - Posted: 13 Aug 2007, 13:54:47 UTC
Last modified: 13 Aug 2007, 13:55:27 UTC

I usually only have 1 Project running on my PC's & set the Resource Share to a high # like 30000 or even higher

I thought if you set resource share to anything over 1000, BOINC reduced it to 1000. I know BAM does this, but I'm not sure if this is enforced either by BOINC or by the projects.

In theory this should give your secondary project a minimum possible resource share of 0.1%. However, this assumes that using out-of-range values doesn't cause BOINC to behave unpredictably, and that resource share actually does still work :-/

I have Xtremlab set up as a backup project, but the estimated crunching times are so far off for that project these days that I can't tell whether it works for me or not :-S
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STE\/E

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Message 12052 - Posted: 13 Aug 2007, 14:06:52 UTC

I tried your 1000 to 1 Resource Share & the Project with the 1 Downloaded 12 hours of work by my estimates, so much for Resource Share ...
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Rob Lilley

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Message 12054 - Posted: 13 Aug 2007, 15:46:27 UTC - in response to Message 12052.  

I tried your 1000 to 1 Resource Share & the Project with the 1 Downloaded 12 hours of work by my estimates, so much for Resource Share ...

It may take a while for changes in Resource Share to have an effect on the amount of work each project fetches, as I think it affects how quickly Long Term Debt accumulates for each project. The Long Term Debt then determines which projects request work, and how much they request - that's my understanding of it anyway.

In any case as your background project has recently requested a large amount of work, it should have accumulated a fairly large negative Long Term Debt, which means that it should not request more work until quite a while after your machine has finished crunching work for that project. In the meantime, there's probably not much you can do except maybe temporarily set the background project to "no new tasks" and perhaps abort some of the unwanted work units.

Anyone else got any ideas, as I'm not an expert, so I may be talking out of my posterior...?
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Aurora Borealis
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Message 12055 - Posted: 13 Aug 2007, 16:03:29 UTC
Last modified: 13 Aug 2007, 16:12:33 UTC

You didn't say what projects you're taking about. For example, Seti servers have not been responding well to work request recently. Your secondary project would then fill the cache in a case like this to insure you don't run out of work. Resource share and long term debt should ensure that the secondary project wont get new work for a long time once work is available on your primary.

Note: V5.10.x have an additional cache setting. I keep the connect setting small and control my cache with the extra option.

Boinc V 7.4.36
Win7 i5 3.33G 4GB NVidia 470
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STE\/E

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Message 12071 - Posted: 14 Aug 2007, 12:11:55 UTC

I finally figured out what was going on, due to my misunderstanding I guess on how the BOINC Client works when requesting work was the reason for getting to many Wu's from the Backup Project.

I'm running Cosmology as the main project and Riesel Sieve as the backup project. Well the Cosmology Project has a limit of 25 Wu's at one time you can have Cached on the Host. As you finish 1 Wu another 1 is sent to replace that 1, with my Quad Core PC's 25 Wu's is only about 9-10 hours of work. With my Contact Preferences set to 1 day I guess the backup project was just trying to fill up the Cache to what I was requesting even though it only had a 0.10% Resource Share.

I lowered my Contact Preferences to 0.5 and then tried getting work from the backup project and it only gave me a couple of Wu's since the Cache was almost full already from the main project. Learned something there about setting up backup projects.

It would seem to me that it would be better if when downloading work that the Client should go by the Resource Share % of the 2 or how ever many Projects your calling work from & only give you enough work to keep running so that when the Main Project sends you work again you wouldn't have to either run or Abort all the unwanted Wu's from the Backup Project.

Because I know I've run into the problem before that the Backup Project sent so many Wu's now the Main Project won't give you any new work until you get rid of some of the backup project Wu's.
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Keck_Komputers
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Message 12081 - Posted: 15 Aug 2007, 3:55:01 UTC

I am glad you spotted this. I was starting to get worried since my experience had shown that the newer clients were better behaved when getting work for backup projects.


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John Kelly

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Message 12112 - Posted: 17 Aug 2007, 16:20:48 UTC

Hello,

Surely the Resource share is related to the amount of time a processor will be devoted to that task and the amount of work to keep in hand will have nothing to do with the amount of effort devoted by that cpu.

At the moment I have the following

Project 1 RS = 100 Therefoe CPU share is 8.33%
Project 2 RS = 100 CPU share is 8.33%
Project 3 RS = 1000 CPU share is 83.33%

If you only have one project running it is irrelevant what the resource share is set to as it will always result in CPU share is 100%

These percentages are a percentage of the total time permitted by the general settings in the manager. So if overall processor time is set to 50% then project 3 would only receive 41.666% of the actual processor time.

None of that would have any effect on how many work units are waiting to be worked on.......I would think how many work units you have waiting will be a function of how much drive space has been allocated in conjunction with the settings for visits to the main server etc etc.

Or have I misunderstood the manual completely?

Best Wishes.....John
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