Hi,
I'm new to the BOINC concept, although using seti@home since 2000. Hopefully I'm in the right forum here :)
My transition went smoothe on most machines, but the newest one is causing some pain :-(
When starting the BOINC Manager, everything seems to work fine, but after some time (2 or 3 hours) the problems begin: There seems to be a problem connecting to the websites for requesting new workunits or sending completed ones, lots of error messages occure in the logs (I can post them later on, when I'm back home). It happens to all projects I run (seti, einstein, climate, wcn).
After a reboot, the manager connects immediately, sending and receiving without problem, then after another 2 or 3 hours it again won't work. If I wait for a full 24 hours, normally nothing can be started on this machine, claiming that the apps are no windows apps at all, so I think this is related to a resource problem, although I cannot think why it could be so, because on my other machines everythingworks just fine.
The climate project even has a bigger problem, it always runs into errors and then won't continue for the rest of the day.`

Here is the configuration for the PC:
AMD 64X2 4200, 2 GB RAM, WinXP SP2 with all security updates. There is no overclocking or aggressive timing setting.
Maybe someone has an idea what causes those problems, or what to check first?

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Well I will be the first to guess, have you scanned for viruses? Next try one or both of these programs;

Prime95 Torture test

Memtest86,

Are you getting adequate cooling, as the projects can and will make the cpus run hotter....

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BOINC Wiki

Another way to see if it is an overheating problem is to just stop BOINC for an hour or so, then restart it and see if it works.

Also, start the computer. SHUT DOWN BOINC; run for 4 hours, then start BOINC, does this problem pattern occur?

Can you get the CPU temps from the BIOS?

This is a strange one. But, since the computer is newest, I would be leaning to a heat problem (heatsink too small, not properly installed, etc.) or perhaps buggy BIOS. Have you looked to see if there is an updated BIOS?

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Hi Dirk,

You can check the temperature (as Paul suggests) of various probes using something like SpeedFan if you don't already have a motherboard / BIOS monitor app

You can check your network throughput and see what's going on (if you've WiFi could be a nasty neighbour stealing bandwidth, or if cable you may be getting all the local kids getting home from school and clogging the pipe with Britney downloads) with something like PRTG Traffic Monitor

As Jim suggested Virus / Malware could be an issue. I'm hoping you have an active, up-to-date anti-virus but if not I recommend with NOD32 or the new (beta) MS OneCare as they both have very low demands on the system (Norton or McAfee for instance place much higher demands in terms of both memory and CPU usage on the system). Other anti-virus or malware suggestions here

I was actually about to post a suggestion here to have BOINC able to pause is CPU temperature exceeds a certain figure... topical obviously ;)

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Random Thoughts

Well I will be the first to guess, have you scanned for viruses? Next try one or both of these programs;

Prime95 Torture test

Memtest86,

Are you getting adequate cooling, as the projects can and will make the cpus run hotter....

Hi Jim,
thanks for your response. I'll try to check the tests you advised, allthough I've had a pair of zip's running for about 24 hours (small batches zipping up 1.5 gb of harddisk, testing the archives, deleting them, running again) to check if CPU or HD are having problems, but that worked fine. No viruses, as far as antivir says.
Cooling should be ok, temperature of CPU never goes beyond 54�C at full throttle.
If your tests will work ok, I think I'll try reinstalling the whole system, just to make sure.

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Another way to see if it is an overheating problem is to just stop BOINC for an hour or so, then restart it and see if it works.

Also, start the computer. SHUT DOWN BOINC; run for 4 hours, then start BOINC, does this problem pattern occur?

Can you get the CPU temps from the BIOS?

This is a strange one. But, since the computer is newest, I would be leaning to a heat problem (heatsink too small, not properly installed, etc.) or perhaps buggy BIOS. Have you looked to see if there is an updated BIOS?

Hi Paul,
thanks for your reply.
Temperature never goes beyond 54�C, so this should be ok. I'll try to delay the start of BOINC to check your ideas, as well as the stop in between. The BIOS is already flashed to the newest version (one of my first shots) because there seem to be lots of problems related to the new CPUs and motherboards without the latest BIOSes.
I'll report back after all the suggested changes, thanks a lot!

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Hi Dirk,

You can check the temperature (as Paul suggests) of various probes using something like SpeedFan if you don't already have a motherboard / BIOS monitor app

You can check your network throughput and see what's going on (if you've WiFi could be a nasty neighbour stealing bandwidth, or if cable you may be getting all the local kids getting home from school and clogging the pipe with Britney downloads) with something like PRTG Traffic Monitor

As Jim suggested Virus / Malware could be an issue. I'm hoping you have an active, up-to-date anti-virus but if not I recommend with NOD32 or the new (beta) MS OneCare as they both have very low demands on the system (Norton or McAfee for instance place much higher demands in terms of both memory and CPU usage on the system). Other anti-virus or malware suggestions here

I was actually about to post a suggestion here to have BOINC able to pause is CPU temperature exceeds a certain figure... topical obviously ;)

Hi,
thanks for your thoughts!
Temperature seems to be ok (please see other posts), viruses were not found, there even is nearly no chance for them, having not installed much but OS, fixes, drivers and Utilities from the vendor and as apps virus scanner and boinc. As I said, the PC is relatively new and I thought it would be a good test to look at the performance of BOINC before putting it to work (software repackaging often is a bit tricky if the PC is not working 100% errorfree ;-) )
, but I will try the scanners you suggested to be absolutely sure.
About network performance there is nothing I could complain about if trying to download or browse via Firefox, fileaccess on my server (which is also the router) is very fast.
I'll report back after my tests!

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Hi there,
I took some time to check your ideas, but that didn't solve my problems. So I tried a clean new install, and now my machine runs like hell :-)
Thanks a lot for all your support, I cannot say what was wrong with my first installation, as far as I can tell it was no different from this one, but maybe the first time some bytes got squared ;-)

Cheers, and a happy new year to everyone in this forum!

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