What are the reasons that some people avoid BOINC project?

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Profile Ranjit Shankar

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Message 79209 - Posted: 22 Jun 2017, 13:26:44 UTC

Hello Everyone,

Please feel free to teach me what are the reasons that some people avoid BOINC project. What is BOINC.exe? Is it safe thing to do?

Best Regards
Ranjit
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Profile adrianxw
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Message 79287 - Posted: 25 Jun 2017, 14:31:51 UTC - in response to Message 79209.  
Last modified: 25 Jun 2017, 14:42:07 UTC

I am not totally sure what you are asking.

If you mean why do people not run BOINC I think the biggest reason is simply ignorance of its existance. Other reasons will include the loading it puts on a system, in particular the heating of the CPU which will be running full speed on all cores.

If you mean a specific BOINC project, there could be many reasons. I tend to avoid projects which do not support open scientific research. I therefore avoid mathematical and cryptological projects. I have also dropped projects when they have done something which I do not agree with or openly annoys me.

BOINC.exe is the core process of the BOINC system. It manages the download / upload of work, it looks after the swapping between tasks etc.

Is it safe, yes. I have run BOINC from its start, and the old SaH program that was it's predecessor from sometime last centuary, and neither has caused me problems which I could not readily identify and fix. In fact their have been very few of those either. A recent one was with a project that ran its jobs in a virtual processor, but ran the VM at normal priority, rather than the normal low priority thus impacting the systems performance. On an ordinary machine, in an ordinary setting, I would say it is perfectly safe.
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Norwickia

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Message 79731 - Posted: 23 Jul 2017, 3:22:22 UTC - in response to Message 79209.  

I have used the Boinc manager on and off over many years. I recently downloaded and tried to run it with a Dell 7558, 64 bit OS ,i7 5500U, 2.4 Ghtz, 8 GB RAM, and Windows 10. Unfortunately the application uses so much memory that the application completely locks up the laptop. I attempted the adjust the preferences to manage the RAM but still have the same memory usage issues. I will be uninstalling the BOINC application simply to regain control of the laptop. The problem probably falls into the category of user ineptitude.
Good luck with the project.
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robsmith
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Message 79732 - Posted: 23 Jul 2017, 7:21:12 UTC

I think you are asking several questions.
First - they don't run BOINC based projects because they either don't know about it
Second - they don't develop BOINC based applications because they don't know about it,or can't, for any number of reasons, develop the required applications.
Third - BOINC is an environment to run distributed computing scientific data projects. BOINC.exe is the user end of this environment, as such it does no "work", it co-ordinates the running of work from projects.
Forth - In the sense that any "is any software safe" then BOINC is "safe". (However I dare say there may be a rogue application out there somewhere)

There are several steps you need to complete, first download & install BOINC on your computer, second select and join at least one project - there is a list of projects provided as part of the BOINC installation, and you access this by selecting the "add project" option on first run. Third, allow BOINC to run the project, by default it will run when your computer is turned on, but not being used, and may appear as a screensaver if the project and application has one built in.
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Profile Jord
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Message 79740 - Posted: 23 Jul 2017, 20:17:19 UTC - in response to Message 79731.  

Unfortunately the application uses so much memory that the application completely locks up the laptop.
Which application?

On my Windows 7 system, boinc.exe uses about 16MB, boincmgr.exe around 38MB RAM. For Windows 10 it won't be much more than that.
If you're talking about a project application, yes there are projects where the tasks take 1 - 10 GB per task. Those projects warn about that, and it's something that's being investigated how to make BOINC recognize that.
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robsmith
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Message 79750 - Posted: 24 Jul 2017, 10:41:04 UTC - in response to Message 79732.  

This lock-up may not be a lack of memory, but the application becoming a "processor hog" - it uses all the available computational resources and so effectively stops other things running.
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Richard Haselgrove
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Message 79753 - Posted: 24 Jul 2017, 11:28:06 UTC - in response to Message 79750.  

I think memory is the more likely cause. BOINC-spawned project applications run at lowered priority, and modern operating systems are pretty good at multitasking.
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mmonnin

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Message 79769 - Posted: 25 Jul 2017, 13:12:44 UTC - in response to Message 79209.  

Hello Everyone,

Please feel free to teach me what are the reasons that some people avoid BOINC project. What is BOINC.exe? Is it safe thing to do?

Best Regards
Ranjit


People quit when they get their 1st electricity bill. The cost of money for electricity makes people quit.
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dentaku

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Message 79808 - Posted: 27 Jul 2017, 11:29:12 UTC

Because the official dsownload package does not even run on a standard Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 64Bit system (probably the widest spread Linux distribution in the world) ... ("./boincmgr: error while loading shared libraries: libwx_gtk2u_html-2.8.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
")
BOINC 7.2.42 (x86_64) on Linux Ubuntu 16.04 (64 Bit), AMD APU 7850K 3.7 GHz, 32 GB RAM.
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Message boards : Questions and problems : What are the reasons that some people avoid BOINC project?

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