Einstein@home not running all the time

Hi Chester,
I've just had a look at the computers you have registered with this project and there are two with AMD Sempron 3000+ processors which look like they might be the same machine. If you only have one machine, the second instance must have been created by mistake and you can merge the two to correct this. If you do actually have two machines, all is OK and no merging should be attempted.

One of the two hosts contacted the server on Oct 05 UTC. At that time it reported a task from the R3 science run that had originally been sent back on August 14 and then aborted by you on Oct 05. You were quite correct to abort this task as the previous R3 run has completely finished and there would have been no point in trying to complete it. Interestingly, the version of BOINC that was in use up to the time the task was aborted was 5.10.45 so if you have since upgraded to the latest version, it would seem that the upgrade had nothing to do with the apparent slow running of the science app. There seems to have been little progress under the previous version as well.

Another thing to be aware of is that the new task currently being crunched is from the R4 science run and you can expect the crunch time to be quite a bit longer that what it was for the R3 tasks. Your current task is likely to take around 20 hours or more in total so the estimate of remaining time (6:34) is not accurate. It will turn out to be about another 17 hours. Once the task has finished, BOINC will be much better at making future estimates.

BOINC will cause the science app to run and use all the available CPU cycles on offer, unless your preferences, or other applications you are running, dictate otherwise. There is a preference setting that only allows BOINC to run when your computer is otherwise idle. There is a preference setting for only running between certain hours. If these preferences are in place, it would be one reason why the E@H app is not running all the time. Are you running any other compute intensive applications? The E@H science app runs at the lowest priority so that it will quickly stop running if your CPU is needed for other intensive tasks - for example modern computer games.

Why don't you run the task manager and check what percentage of the CPU is being assigned to the E@H science app? Also check out what other tasks might be consuming large fractions of the available CPU cycles.

If E@H was running all the time without problems under the previous version of BOINC, how come the task sent on August 14 wasn't completed well before October 05? It seems like you may have been having problems for a while. One thing you could do to help the diagnosis is to stop BOINC and then restart it so as to capture all the startup messages from the messages tab of BOINC Manager. If you cut and paste those messages into a reply here, it may help to throw some light on what is actually going on.