Posts by DJStarfox

1) Message boards : Projects : News on Project Outages (Message 100080)
Posted 22 Jul 2020 by DJStarfox
Post:
In reply to the certificate error on Seti@Home:

Eric Korpela, Seti main dev wrote:
We're in the process of swapping web servers and the cert generation hasn't caught up yet. I expect that it will be in place in the next day or so.


Good to know. Glad they didn't get hacked!
2) Message boards : Questions and problems : Virtual Memory Size (Message 70760)
Posted 9 Jul 2016 by DJStarfox
Post:
I recently noticed that my boinc client 6.10.45 is using 24GB of virtual memory space. Resident space is only 7MB, which seems reasonable. This is after a fresh startup. Why does the client allocate so much virtual memory space?

#ps aux
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
boinc 2879 0.1 0.0 25275148 7916 ? SN 14:27 0:00 /usr/bin/boinc_client --dir /var/lib/boinc
3) Message boards : Questions and problems : Cross Project Identifier (Message 27422)
Posted 15 Sep 2009 by DJStarfox
Post:
Before, when I last changed my email address, the cross project ID for all projects stayed the same. New projects that I joined would "learn" the old ID after a couple of Updates from the Client/Mgr.

Yesterday, I changed all my email addresses again for all projects at the same time. Today, all my stats are gone on the various stats websites.

I found myself under a new cross project ID. However, all the history, SETI Classic, trends, etc. are gone, because the stats think it's a new account. Is there a way to re-link the history from the old cross project IDs into the new one?
4) Message boards : BOINC client : boinc over nfs: too short timeout (Message 26641)
Posted 17 Aug 2009 by DJStarfox
Post:
Try adding the following mount options, replacing what you have already:
soft,proto=tcp,locallocks

If that doesn't help, add these:
rsize=1024,wsize=1024,retrans=10

Is computer B using an ethernet or a wireless connection? If it is wireless, packet loss may be hurting performance/causing problems, and the second set of options should help. But reliability will be at the cost of throughput.
5) Message boards : BOINC client : CUDA problem with Fedora 11 (Message 26595)
Posted 13 Aug 2009 by DJStarfox
Post:
If you update to the latest kernel (as of this post) and livna RPM for the Nvidia drivers, CUDA will work. Be sure to check permissions of your /dev/nvidia0 device... as whatever user runs BOINC needs to have write permission to the /dev/nv* devices.
6) Message boards : BOINC client : boinc over nfs: too short timeout (Message 26594)
Posted 13 Aug 2009 by DJStarfox
Post:
What are the values of the following computing preferences set to?

Switch between applications every ?
Write to disk at most every ?

You should increase these values to 4x what they are by default.

Also, what does the mount line in your /etc/fstab have? Specifically I'm interested in all mount options for NFS.
7) Message boards : Server programs : Feeder (Message 26106)
Posted 19 Jul 2009 by DJStarfox
Post:
Well, my assumption was that there is a concurrency issue, and having two buffers would reduce the latency. But if just having a larger buffer would have the same benefit as two smaller buffers, then it would just make a lot more sense to have a bigger buffer (no programming).
8) Message boards : Server programs : Feeder (Message 26083)
Posted 17 Jul 2009 by DJStarfox
Post:
By reducing the failure rate (times clients connect but don't get any work because the feeder/scheduler is too busy), clients will request work less often, reducing bandwidth (a little). Also, but making the feeder/scheduler faster, the response time may improve too, also reducing overall bandwidth.

Just a theory. The big assumption is that the feeder is heavily delayed by the database and the scheduler is waiting on the feeder at least a significant amount of time.
9) Message boards : Server programs : Feeder (Message 26075)
Posted 17 Jul 2009 by DJStarfox
Post:
Having a slow database connection (in relation to local storage or system memory) is typical for most applications.... so in order to workaround that...

What I meant by a double buffer system was to have the feeder have two threads and two buffers (queues). The scheduler pulls from queue 1 while the feeder is busy filling queue 2. When queue 1 is empty, they both swap buffers. In theory, this should give the scheduler more throughput and allow for higher latencies on the database connection when filling the buffer.
10) Message boards : Server programs : Feeder (Message 26070)
Posted 17 Jul 2009 by DJStarfox
Post:
Based on a discussion in this SETI thread, I would like to know if adding a double buffer to the feeder would result in a more efficient (and higher throughput) system. As most of you know, SETI is the largest project by number of volunteers, and their servers are extremely busy.

What performance metrics do we have to measure this part of the BOINC server-side system?

My goal is to help BOINC scale up better.
11) Message boards : BOINC client : Use at most x processors (Message 14147)
Posted 28 Nov 2007 by DJStarfox
Post:
Hi,

How hard would it be to reprogram BOINC to use at most x processors when user is active? This would be in addition to "Use at most x processors" setting now. This new setting would replace "do work when user idle" setting; just set CPUs to zero for no work when user is active.

12) Message boards : BOINC client : Linux: Do work while computer is running on batteries? (Message 12800)
Posted 29 Sep 2007 by DJStarfox
Post:
Have you tried "boinc_cmd --set_run_mode never"?


That works, but when I execute boinc_cmd --set-run-mode auto, the tasks keep suspending, restarting, suspending, restarting every 1 sec. Then, I have to kill BOINC process to stop it.
13) Message boards : BOINC client : Linux: Do work while computer is running on batteries? (Message 12798)
Posted 29 Sep 2007 by DJStarfox
Post:
The "Do work while computer is running on batteries?" option in Linux appears to be unsupported. Sending SIGPWR to the BOINC core client process does nothing. I'm running version 5.8.16, the latest stable version at this time.

Init *should* send SIGPWR to all running processes when apcupsd daemon detects a powerloss. I'm running apcupsd version 3.14.1 (with Fedora Core 7). I tried sending a manual signal to BOINC:
kill -SIGPWR `ps -e|grep boinc|grep -v boincmgr|awk '{ print $1 }'`

However, like I said, this does nothing. Does anyone have a clever way to tell BOINC to SUSPEND when the power goes off? The only boinc_cmd that works in the onbattery script (called by apcupsd) is --quit. Writing a script to go around BOINC seems a hack though; the process should automatically SUSPEND all tasks given SIGPWR and resume previous state on another signal (which one?).
14) Message boards : BOINC client : WORK_FETCH_DONT_NEED Unimplemented in Project initialization (Message 11935)
Posted 3 Aug 2007 by DJStarfox
Post:
Hi,

This is a feature request, but maybe a bug?

I would like a feature to NOT download any new work when attaching a project. This looks tricky but hopefully a genius coder out there can make it a one-liner.

In the code client_state.h:
WORK_FETCH_DONT_NEED is defined as 0

...so a project will not get new work.

The constructor for class PROJECT in client_types.c sets:
work_request_urgency = WORK_FETCH_DONT_NEED;
dont_request_more_work = false;

However, the code when attaching a project requests 1 second of new work ALWAYS.

After the project's "communication deferred" expires, the "[state_debug] set dirty:" will cause the policy to revisit and (most likely) download work. At least that will give time to set no new tasks on the project. Downloading project files (graphics, readme, etc.) would be fine, just no new work!

Ideally, this would be a global preference or a flag in the cc_config.xml file.
15) Message boards : BOINC Manager : My Wish List - 2 (Message 11934)
Posted 3 Aug 2007 by DJStarfox
Post:
It looks like BOINC uses the system default font instead of the themed font. I haven't experimented with fonts in GNOME nor the 5.10.x client, so I'm sorry I don't have a solution to the font problem.

Perhaps you should start a new thread somewhere regarding the fonts with 5.10.x clients, rather than in the wish list thread. Others may be able to help.
16) Message boards : BOINC Manager : My Wish List - 2 (Message 11706)
Posted 19 Jul 2007 by DJStarfox
Post:
BOINC Manager Linux should use desktop themes. It looks really awful, the fonts are badly aliased, dull grey GUI components. It looks like from an old windows toolkit.


v5.8.16 changes its look with the current GNOME desktop theme. I guess they added it. :)
17) Message boards : BOINC Manager : My Wish List - 2 (Message 11705)
Posted 19 Jul 2007 by DJStarfox
Post:
This may seem strange, but I would like a client feature to NOT download new work when attaching to a project. A feature in cc_config.xml would be idea. Perhaps this should be a command line switch on the boinc client itself too.

1) I would like this feature because I have needed to detach/re-attach to a project in an effort to restore it to a working state.
2) Downloading the project files would be OK, just no work units.
3) It would prevent a computer id from being generated and work being assigned to the computer.

If there is already this feature, please tell me!




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