Einstein@Home won't accept lower priority of resources among BOINC projects
29 Dec 2011 17:07:03 UTC
Topic 196118
(moderation:
I initially had Einstein@Home set as equal resource share, but observed that only Einstein@Home tasks were running.
I tried suspending an individual Einstein@Home task, but instead of causing the other project's (Test4Theory@Home) task to run, a new Einstein@Home task was started - as "high priority". This happened repeatedly.
I went into the project preferences and demoted Einstein@Home to a relative value of 30 (compared to 100's for the other 2 projects). No effect, Einstein@Home still dominates the queue.
I then set Einstein@Home to fetch no more work, and then disabled all of the queued Einstein@Home tasks. Finally the task from the other project started.
It appears that BOINC is causing Einstein@Home to dominate the resource usage by setting all of its tasks to "high priority". This is rather inconvenient and defeats the purpose of sharing, and relative allocation, doesn't it? What is the proper way to handle this situation / problem?
Einstein@Home won't accept lower priority of resources among BOI
)
If you set your Resourse Share too low for Einstein, ie allowing less time allocated to Einstein, then Einstein must go into High Priority otherwise it's work won't get done before deadline,
I suggest a lower cache setting instead, then you won't get too much einstein work in the first place.
Claggy
Thank you, I just checked and
)
Thank you, I just checked and my queue was already set to 0.25 days (I'm assuming queue = Network usage --> maintain enough work for an additional X days)
It's a bit counter-intuitive that reducing the priorities caused the reverse behavior, but I can understand how that is just a short-term blip and long term it would balance. Thanks,
Dave
RE: Thank you, I just
)
There's actually two cache settings, the other one is:
Computer is connected to the Internet about every
Leave blank or 0 if always connected.
BOINC will try to maintain at least this much work.
If you put 5 days in there, Boinc will cache 5 days of work (on top of the other cache setting), But will also try and get all work done 5 days before deadline, making things worse for projects with shorter deadlines,
Claggy
Ahh, that might be the
)
Ahh, that might be the culprit. Mine was actually set to 10 days. I've adjusted it to 0, hopefully that will do the trick. I'll try it out for awhile and post back when I know one way or the other. Thanks for the quick response / help.
Dave
Update: The problem
)
Update: The problem persists. I've had the above settings for > 12 hours now, but when I checked this morning, the 1 task for the Test4Theory project was 70% complete and suspended, and there were 8 Einstein tasks running - all with lower completion. Also, in the meantime, Einstein downloaded some >250 new tasks to add to the queue. I had to manually suspend these in order to get (and keep) the Test4Theory task to run. As we discussed above, my settings are that the computer is always connected to the internet and it only retrieves work for 0.25 days. Any thoughts?
RE: Update: The problem
)
Was that the web computing you reset, or the local computing preferences? the local computing preferences over-ride the web computing preferences, so you might need to Clear those.
Claggy
I checked and modified both,
)
I checked and modified both, they were both set to the minimal cache sizes.
OK, it appears to be working
)
OK, it appears to be working now. Maybe it took some time to register the changes to the settings - I didn't change anything since the last post, but now when I look at all the tasks there are just enough einstein tasks + 1 waiting in reserve. none are running in high priority mode.
Thanks again for the help.
RE: OK, it appears to be
)
When you make a change to preferences on the web page, it has no effect on your host until communicated to the host. This happens under more than one circumstance, but the easy one to enforce is a successful update. So it is a good habit always after changing a web page entered preference to go to boincmgr (or whatever alternate one may use) afterward and do an update for the project on whose web page one made the change (even if it is a general preference and not a project-specific preference that one has changed).
For belt and suspenders assurance, after hitting the update button one can check the message log to see that the update went through and that a preference change was noticed.
Just to create an example, I just now revised a location preference for additional days work from 5.15 to 5.16 days using the general preferences section on the Einstein web page for my account. I then used boincmgr on my host 4234243 to request an Einstein update for that host.
The resulting message traffic for my host looked like this:
This exact appearance came from the message tab in BoincTasks. Looking at it directly in BoincMgr would give somewhat different appearance, but the same messages in the same order. The lines from the one starting "General prefs" through the last shown would not have been present had there not been a preferences change since the last last time this host checked for them with Einstein.