6.4.5 wants to make me work for it...

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Profile Toombra
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Joined: 29 Dec 08
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Message 22168 - Posted: 29 Dec 2008, 21:43:35 UTC
Last modified: 29 Dec 2008, 22:06:33 UTC

Hi everyone, I've been a steady user of BOINC on my home Windows (all 32 bit) machines for a long while now, casually upgrading through the versions as they became available AND contained features that seemed worth a new install. For reference, I currently have 4 personal computers signed up on my account: 1 XP SP3 machine, 2 XP SP1 machines and 1 Vista SP1 machine, none of which have the new Nvidia 3D crunching unfortunately, due to ATI cards and embedded chipsets. Most of the time it's been fairly painless but upgrading from 6.2.x to 6.4.5 seems to have caused me a couple of issues.:

1) First, and I've seen this referenced in other posts for older versions, but this latest version doesn't seem to want to run as boinc_users at all. From a new installer from Administrator to manually adding the group to user accounts... it just will not let BOINC Manager connect to the running process/service. The only success I've had is by adding all users as boinc_admin group, which while less than perfect is acceptable for my setup.

2) BOINC doesn't seem to be listening to my settings override as well as previous versions. Specifically I'm referring to the CPU Usage setting and the "only do work when computer has been idle for" setting. It's hard to describe, but I see this version leaping to 100% usage on the Task Manager or the Temperature monitor when it shouldn't be.

3) On ONE computer and only ONE... I've been working away on something and had the BOINC (specifically Leiden Classical) jump to 100% usage and slow everything else done. It doesn't seem to be runnning at lowest priority if my application performance is any indication. Twenty minutes ago (before searching forums) I told it to suspend and while BOINC Manager acknowledges this in it's log, the project's EXE is still burning away at 100%.

Any help on these issues would be appreciated... or Suggestions? Comments? Laughter?

Here's hoping for 6.5, 6.4.6 or 6.4.5.1 ;)
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Les Bayliss
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Message 22170 - Posted: 29 Dec 2008, 22:18:45 UTC

6.4.5 was brought out for people who wanted to run cuda apps. But a lot of problems from 6.2.* weren't fixed in the release, and a few new ones seem to have appeared, especially with cuda.

As you're not running GPU apps, your simplest fix would be to go back to 6.2.19

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Profile Toombra
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Message 22171 - Posted: 29 Dec 2008, 22:41:41 UTC - in response to Message 22168.  
Last modified: 29 Dec 2008, 22:44:21 UTC

It also seems that 3) is a normal crash/wayward process with the particular project exe. I haven't had one of those for a long time so I just didn't recognize it. Even so, it badly impacts the system and it would be nice if BOINC was able to detect and terminate this. I know plenty of users who would end up complaining "BOINC screws up my computer" and go uninstalling it (assuming they managed to identify that as the problem and not spend hours fiddling with other settings). Watching the process manager, all it seemed to be doing was trying to launch new versions of the same EXE and then wondering why they weren't getting any CPU time because the old version of the EXE was still sucking down 99% while being suspended in the manager.

Could be the Leiden Classical project executable isn't as stable as others. Even so, the framework needs to deal with this better.

6.4.5 was brought out for people who wanted to run cuda apps. But a lot of problems from 6.2.* weren't fixed in the release, and a few new ones seem to have appeared, especially with cuda.

Actually reading through Ageless' version posts it seemed like more had been fixed/changed (plus it did go up 2 numbers :P... though that's a rough guide at best). But, you may be right and I shouldn't be dealing with this version... on the other hand, I just installed 2 other BOINCs of 2.4.5 on family members' PCs over the hollidays so I'm not crazy about having to think up mismatched versions.
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Message boards : Questions and problems : 6.4.5 wants to make me work for it...

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