Computation goes on but progress-indication "hangs"

Hi Richard,

Thanks very much for taking the trouble to answer my questions in detail.

Normally, the CPU time will "tick over" approximately every second. The % done will increment every minute or two if the process is not being interrupted somewhere during that interval. You haven't described your usual usage pattern and the sort of apps that you regularly run on your computer but if you normally start up your box when you want to use it and then do a session of activities like browsing, reading and responding to email, composing or editing documents and other normal "office-like" activities, it wouldn't be surprising to find that you could do several hours of such activities with little progress in the % done figure for your BOINC projects. If you then shut down your computer to go do something else, BOINC would be hard pressed to make any progress at all. Perhaps something like this is causing you to think it is "stuck".

If you are committed to your current settings of allowing BOINC to run only when the computer is idle, you could make a considerable improvement by adjusting the default interval after keyboard/mouse activity ceases before BOINC is allowed to start. If I remember correctly, the default value for your version of BOINC was 3 minutes, which is a very long interval if you sit and watch it expire. If you were to set it to 0.1 minutes, BOINC would be able to kick in a lot sooner and a lot more frequently. Now that you have 2.0 GB of RAM, there's no real reason to force the app out of RAM when suspended. The combination of these two changes should make a fairly significant improvement in the rate of progress.

Absolutely! This is one of the reasons why I'm now thinking that you don't have the genuine freezing of the app that I've occasionally noticed but rather a "pseudo-stuck" situation due to the way your preferences are working.

When software is under very active development (like BOINC is) you miss out on important bug fixes and new features if you don't occasionally upgrade. When you do eventually upgrade after quite an interval, you usually then realise that the old version that you thought was working fine, wasn't really working optimally after all.

One of the reasons that BOINC doesn't "auto upgrade" is that many people who volunteer for distributed computing want to maintain full control and aren't particularly happy with "stealth upgrades" where they might not have full knowledge and control over what exactly is being changed without their direct knowledge and consent. It could be quite a politically sensitive issue. As Ageless mentions, more modern versions of BOINC now keep you directly informed when new recommended versions are available.

The upgrade procedure is straight forward and quick to do. It can be done at any time and there is no loss of data or settings if you follow the steps precisely:-

• * Go to the BOINC website and download your version of choice to your desktop.
  * Completely stop BOINC if it is currently running.
  * Use Windows "Add/Remove..." to uninstall the old version of BOINC (DO NOT manually change anything else)
  * If you are cautious you could make a backup copy of the residual BOINC folder at this point before proceeding.
  * Use the desktop icon to launch the installation of the new version of BOINC and answer the questions asked.
  * Make sure you select the old BOINC folder as the place to install it (in your case C:\\Util\\BOINC).
  

You will be asked to choose between different types of installs - in particular single user install, shared install or service install. There is probably general reluctance to do so but I firmly believe that a service install is the best unless you have a very strong reason for choosing another type. However that is a choice that you have to make and is beyond the scope of this reply.

At the end of the install, the new version will launch and will find all your previous data and settings and will simply carry on from where the old version left off.

In which case there should have been messages announcing the fact each time things stopped and restarted.

I don't really follow you here. Unless you are running BOINC as a service, BOINC is usually launched by BOINC Manager which acts as a GUI front end to BOINC. BOINC is simply a process running on your computer and using very little of your computer's resources. BOINC controls the scheduling of the various science apps. These are what consume resources but because they run at very low priority, they tend to consume mainly the CPU cycles that otherwise would be wasted. When you refer to "no connection with the host" I assume you may be referring to situations where the communication between BOINC Manager and BOINC may have broken down, perhaps? Newer versions of BOINC are likely to be more robust in this regard.

I presume you mean "WASN'T running...". Once started, BOINC is always running until you tell it to stop. Depending on circumstances, there are a couple of ways you may have done this. However, if BOINC did stop, so would have the messages. You appear to have a continuous log in which case BOINC was running all the time.

I was mainly wondering if (to conserve space) you had deliberately left out some messages for the period I specified.

It's a common fallacy to believe that BOINC is likely to interfere with your normal use of your own computer. (It's also a fallacy to think that a personal desktop machine is likely to be more short of available CPU cycles than a server but that's another story for another time :) ). Sure, there may be a few power users out there that regularly consume 20% or more of their computer's CPU cycles but they would be pretty few and far between. On average, I would suspect that a modern personal desktop would be lucky to have less than 95% of all its CPU cycles used for anything but the idle loop.

BOINC does a very good job of getting out of the way when it has to. Have you ever tried to allow BOINC to run continuously for a few hours during your normal usage and see if you can notice the difference? Since your machine appears to be a laptop, you would tend to notice the fan running at higher speed all the time but I'm talking about performance rather than the problem of dealing with excess heat. Because of the heat issue, I refuse to run BOINC on laptops these days, but that again is a different issue.

I think you would be wise to do that, particularly on older versions of BOINC. I think that more recent versions are smarter at waiting for a checkpoint to be written before switching apps for example. You could imagine the loss if BOINC were regularly switching between projects that were not held in memory and where checkpoints weren't being written all that often. E@H is quite frequent with its checkpointing so the potential losses are not that large.

OK, you're welcome! Keep us informed as to how things work out.

I would think that it's quite unrelated because the OP was describing a situation where the progress (% done) had completely stalled whereas your situation doesn't seem to be stalled at all.

Unless you give a lot more details and unless you have observed this over a lengthy period of time and over several tasks, the above may in fact be quite normal. You have two active computers and the results lists of both look quite normal and uneventful. There's no sign of anything but the normal variation in crunch times that everyone experiences.

A possible explanation is that the current task on which you are observing the above is going to take somewhat longer to crunch than previous tasks have. If that's the case, BOINC is simply responding to that by increasing its estimate of how much more time will be needed to complete the task. That way you would see (for a period anyway) both elapsed time and remaining time increasing. If you observe for long enough, the remaining time will reach a peak and then start to decline.

If this doesn't explain your situation, please feel free to start a new thread and more fully describe what it is that you are seeing over a period of time.

I strongly suspect that this is not a bug or anything like it, it's a side effect caused by differences between the way work was split into workunits between S5R2 and S5R3.

In S5R2 (and earlier), each workunit consisted of (IIRC) tens of thousands of individual computations. In S5R3, a workunits consists of only ca 1200 such steps (but they take longer).

After each such step is finished, the "progress" reported to the boinc core client is updated (and the crosshair in the screensaver will move to a new position in the sky). Because of this change, progress now is updated less frequently (depending on speed of the PC between ca 15 seconds and more than a minute!). During the time when progress is not updated, some versions of the BOINC GUI will still calculate a new estimated remaining time, which will *increase* if the GUI sees no progress (as the estimate is based on the time it took to get to the current progress). Once a "progress ping" is received from the science app, the remaining time is adjusted and will drop noticeably.

CU
Bikeman