Disk space question (h1_0xxx.xx_S6GC1 files)
10 Apr 2013 17:33:52 UTC
Topic 196903
(moderation:
I noticed that Einstein@Home takes almost 4 GB of space on my system drive and tried to clean this up a bit. I noticed a lot of files with similar names.
I reset the project and deleted all files in einsten project folder, but it started downloading all of them again.
Does it really need all of them, or is it some sort of bug?
Disk space question (h1_0xxx.xx_S6GC1 files)
)
Einstein differs from other projects by not giving you specific tasks to crunch, but giving you the whole work unit, then telling your BOINC which parts it should run from that. Doing it this way we spill less bandwidth.
To answer your question of whether it needs all these l1 and h1 files, yes it does. Those files added together make up the work units.
If you want to reduce the amount of space Einstein takes up, reduce the amount of days you cache work. Although even then it is possible that files will be kept for a long time, as it can happen that they aren't used for weeks upon end, until they are needed again.
Thank you for the answer. I
)
Thank you for the answer.
I already don't cache workunits, so looks like the only option for me is to move the data folder away from system drive entirely.
RE: Thank you for the
)
You can do this during the Boinc install process, Boinc doesn't care where the files are just so long as it knows where to look.
BOINC is really nice in this
)
BOINC is really nice in this regard; if you need to move it, just shutdown BOINC, move the folder somewhere else, and restart it.
RE: BOINC is really nice in
)
If you do it this way on Windows, BOINC will just remake the data directory in the old place and fill it again, giving you a new hostID with all new work in the process. This is because the data directory path is put into the registry and read from there by the client upon startup.
So don't give out this advice when it's on Windows.
That's worth knowing, thanks.
)
That's worth knowing, thanks. Certainly under linux it's that simple.
How do you move the BOINC location under windows, edit the registry setting or is doing this just not feasible?
RE: That's worth knowing,
)
The easiest way is:
* Shut down BOINC
* Uninstall the BOINC program (which leaves data untouched)
* Move the data folder to the new location
* Re-run the BOINC Windows installer, using the 'Advanced' screen option to set the new location where the data already is.
It takes longer to describe than to do!
RE: That's worth knowing,
)
In Windows the Registry is EVERYTHING, if you mess it up when you misedit it, you can mess up your whole installation. So editing the Registry is only recommended for those willing to risk disaster.
Well, I was never a fan of
)
Well, I was never a fan of centralised control on a per-host basis. Must admit to being a bit surprised the BOINC developers chose the registry route.
Been thinking about this, because yesterday we had a scheduled power outage (installing a new cooker; I can think of others uses for 13.8KW :) ) and I took the opportunity to relocate the BOINC directory on a bunch of computers. While the (linux) hosts were off, it was just a case of moving the directories on the server* - whereas on Windows, I'd have had to log in to every host and go through the procedure Richard explained above (or run a one-time script on boot to edit the registry - yuk).
Maybe it's just a lack of experience with modern Windows (last I used was XP), but it feels a bit like the support effort incurred by adding the Windows PCs here to the local BOINC workgroup would be disproportionate, for reasons like this.
*The move command was 'mv ~/BOINC /var/lib/boinc'
As with anything (especially
)
As with anything (especially where Windows is concerned), there are many ways of achieving the same thing.
Not knowing the general level of technical knowledge in the audience here (and being aware that there are generally many more readers than posters), I chose a relatively robust, 'by the book' process.
In reality, all I was telling you to do was to change the string stored in
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Space Sciences Laboratory, U.C. Berkeley\BOINC Setup]
"DATADIR"="D:\\BOINCdata\\"
- you'll see that I've already moved mine away from the default location.
If you move the program location too, the value to change is
"INSTALLDIR"="D:\\BOINC\\"
For anybody comfortable in a command line scripting environment, it would be simple to wrap a STOP|MOVE|REG|START script round that, and automate the whole process. But it's not advisable for the GUI generation.