Posts by Mr Anderson

1) Message boards : BOINC Manager : Suspend tasks after checkpoint (Message 104832)
Posted 19 Jul 2021 by Mr Anderson
Post:
@Keith Myers I believe I have mentioned this before at Einstein@home and the response was that it was a Boinc issue. I tend to agree; this is not about whether or not a task has the ability to checkpoint (all the tasks I run do checkpoint), or how often but about a function to suspend tasks once checkpointing has been done. Boinc is the front end for the tasks and it manages which task executes or is suspended so this is the place to do this.

@Richard Haselgrove I don't think timing is an issue. If a task reports to Boinc that it has checkpointed then all write operations done by the task have been completed from the task's point of view so it can be immediately suspended. If Boinc is also shutting down the system then once the last task has been suspended then Boinc can initiate this. However Boinc is not actually turning the computer off, it is the operating system and whether or not the operating system is still writing the data or some lazy write needs to finish is not Boinc's concern since it is up to the operating system to manage these things when the system is shut down. Any operating system that is worth its salt will take care of all that and anything less is a major bug that would repeatedly result in data loss.

BOINCTasks sounds interesting but somewhat overkill for my needs. I don't particularly want yet another application to manage Boinc. Why can't Boinc do this itself?
2) Message boards : BOINC Manager : Suspend tasks after checkpoint (Message 104815)
Posted 17 Jul 2021 by Mr Anderson
Post:
I don't like how shutting down or rebooting the PC often wastes work done on the running tasks because they might not have checkpointed for a while. I propose two enhancements:

1. The "CPU time since checkpoint", which can be seen by clicking on a task and selecting properties, should be an optional column in the tasks list. This way the user can quickly see whether any running tasks have recently checkpointed or not.

2. A function to suspend any running tasks once they have checkpointed (and not allow new tasks to run in their place). The user can select this some time before shutting down so that they stop processing and the computer can then be shut down without wasting work. (Perhaps this could even be extended to perform the actual shut down.) When the system and Boinc restarts then the option should automatically clear.
3) Message boards : Questions and problems : Installer keeps changing my screensaver settings (Message 103077)
Posted 18 Feb 2021 by Mr Anderson
Post:
The BOINC Windows installer changes my screensaver settings every time I update the software. I do not want the BOINC one and in my opinion BOINC should just be there in the background and not intrusive but here it is screaming out for attention! Changing the screensaver should be an option in the installer instead of simply changing it. I guess this is a fairly minor annoyance but enough of a reason for me to defer installing new versions.



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